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Zigzagging 
in the Orient 



1921-22 



FRED L. GRAY 

•I 






COPYRIGHT 1922 

by 

FRED L. GRAY 



OCT-8'22 



GUIDE POSTS ALONG THE WAY 

Page 

Some Japanese Snapshots 9 

Japan, Seen From Korea (the "Chosen") . . 17 

Chaotic China 22 

Java — The Garden of the East 31 

The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas .... 42 

Bewitching Burma 52 

India — The Indescribable 63 

Delhi — India's New-Old Capital 73 

Some Typical Native States — 

Jaipur 82 

Udaipur 86 

Baroda 92 

Rural India, Native Travel and the Rail- 
ways 98 

Cities and Temples of the South 106 

The Uncanny Side of India 110 

Captivating Ceylon 118 

"Mahatma" Gandhi— Demi-God or Dema- 
gogue? 128 

Later Developments in the Non-Cooperative 

Movement 143 

Home-Coming Ruminations 146 



HOW IT HAPPENED 

BEFORE leaving on a *' Round the World** tour, last 
October, I recklessly promised a number of friends to 
write them of our "impressions** as we journeyed 
along. How many another frail, weak human has likewise 
gone astray! 

Very soon it became evident that to carry out this rash 
promise would leave no time to get impressions. So once 
or twice a month a general and more formal letter was sent 
home with instructions that typewritten copies be made for 
those who were expecting to hear from us. 

There my ''lit*ry" adventures would doubtless have 
ended had not the editor of The Minneapolis Journal 
happened to see parts of the story and begun running them 
in his Sunday issues. This unlooked-for publicity proved 
my undoing. So many of my friends, who missed one or 
more of the installments, have asked for copies, and so many 
others have asked for the whole series, that I have been 
forced to take refuge in the print shop! 

Many a globe-trotter before now has inflicted a "private- 
ly circulated** volume of travel on his friends, but I submit 
that none of the tribe ever drummed up a more plausible 
excuse for the offense than the one here given. Anyhow, 
here are the letters — the whole batch of them — and with them 
my promise to sin no more. 

All that can be said for these rambling sketches is that 
they represent a sincere attempt to make the folks ''back 
home** see some of the strange things on the other side of the 



Pacific just as the casual traveler sees them, rather than as 
a professional writer or research student might portray them. 
And all that I really hope for, in getting them together in this 
shape, is that they may tempt some good friend of mine to 
fare forth and see the wonders of the Orient for himself. 

F. L. G. 



Minneapolis, Minnesota. 
September 1, 1922. 



SOME JAPANESE SNAPSHOTS 

November 1921 

WE had been accustomed to think of Japan as a 
land which had been catapulted out of the tenth 
century into the nineteenth, a land which 
within the memory of many now living had suddenly 
abandoned the ways of the East for those of the 
West. We were aware that both industrially and 
politically its people had begun to take rank in the 
modern world and we knew that their naval and mili- 
tary strength had made them a force to be reckoned 
with everywhere. Hence we were scarcely prepared 
to find so much of the old Japan, the Japan of our pic- 
ture-book days, still in evidence on every hand. 

The powers that be in this bewildering country are 
unmistakably modern. Public officials and those who 
direct the government owned railways as well as the 
postal, telegraph and telephone services, apparently do 
much the same things and in much the same ways that 
similar officials do the world over. Those engaged in 
"big business" impress one as being fully abreast of the 
times. But if outward appearances count for anything 
the rank and file of the population still live in the past. 
They cling tenaciously to their Oriental traditions, 
customs and garb. 

Automobiles, trolley cars, modern factories, Eur- 
opean dress and American movies are not novelties in 
Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and other large cities. Yet 
even in such commercial centers, jinrikshas vastly out- 
number flivvers and flowing kimonos are still far more 

9 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



popular than coats and vests, while the occasional sound 
of squeaking shoe leather is drowned in the clatter of 
wooden clogs. 

Here and there a steel frame structure audaciously 
punctures the sky line, but as likely as not its next 
door neighbor is a Buddhist temple or a Shinto 
shrine, continuing serenely as a going concern in its 
ancient location. The occasional European hotel or 
cafe cuts a lonely and incongruous figure in the 
midst of a wilderness of tea-houses where apparently 99 
per cent of the population still squat on their haunches, 
eating rice concoctions with chop-sticks, precisely as 
their ancestors have done for ages. 

In Tokyo there is a great department store which 
would do credit to any American city, yet the throngs 
that patronize it leave their clogs at the door 
and shuffle in on clean, noiseless sandals, just as they do 
when entering a temple, while the salespeople who wait 
on them add up purchases and compute change with 
the help of an antiquated Chinese counting board. To 
see the crowds that pack this store one might imagine it 
had a monopoly of Tokyo's retail trade, but as a matter 
of fact the vast majority of the 2,500,000 people of the 
city continue to buy at the little toy-like shops which 
for centuries have lined its narrow streets. 

The old order is still overwhelmingly in evi- 
dence, even in these metropolitan cities, and when one 
goes to the smaller towns of the interior there is scarcely 
anything, save the railway and its telegraph and mail 
accompaniments, which even remotely suggests the 
world we know today. In these latter places, European 

10 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



attire is still a curiosity, and although we are told that for 
years past English has been included in the curriculum of 
every Japanese high school, hardly anyone we met in the 
rural communities could comprehend any of our vocal 
output, save those magical and universally understood 
words — "How much?" 

Our two weeks' swing through the Island Empire 
has impressed us with the uniform courtesy of its people, 
their prodigious industry, their physical cleanliness and 
their law-abiding disposition, and it is of these character- 
istics that we wish particularly to speak. 

As to courtesy: the Japanese may be a dangerous 
lot, bent on making mischief in the world, but certainly 
their outward attitude toward each other, and toward the 
strolling foreigner, would seem to belie any such theory. 
They are eternally bowing and smiling, and in such a 
gracious and apparently spontaneous way that one can't 
help feeling it is sincere. The spectacle of two Japanese 
gentlemen engaged in a bowing match as they casually 
meet on the street is a feast for Occidental eyes, unac- 
customed to such excessive politeness. Each brings his 
head to a level with his hips in a profound obeisance and 
then repeats the performance again and again until his 
courteous contestant shows some slight symptom of a 
waning interest in the game. It is a sight calculated to 
make the average American feel that he, rather than the 
little brown man of Nippon, is really the benighted one. 

We have been cautioned by more than one foreigner 
of long experience that Japanese politeness is largely 
superficial and should not be taken too seriously, but we 
find it difficult to believe that it does not come from the 

11 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



heart. Whatever its quality, it cannot be ascribed to 
the influence of western civilization, for from the time 
of the Shoguns, the everyday manners of the people have 
been more or less a matter of governmental concern. 
Even in days as recent as those when some of our worthy 
Puritans were burning Salem ladies alive for witchcraft, 
the Japanese who, under certain circumstances, showed 
his back teeth when smiling, or who failed to show them 
when certain other circumstances called for a smile, 
laid himself liable to death ! 

Japanese cleanliness is proverbial. The daily bath 
is a national rite, while the immaculate floor mat, on 
which no one would dream of stepping without first 
removing his street footwear, is the corner stone of every 
home, from the thatched roof abode of the humblest 
peasant to the lacquered palace of the Emperor. If 
cleanliness is indeed next to godliness, the Japanese 
might well send missionaries to us instead of our 
attempting to convert them. Yet we can give them a 
few practical pointers on plumbing and about sanitation 
in general. Surface sewers are still the fashion over here, 
and most of the fertilizer used on the farms continues to 
come from the cesspools of city and town dwellers. 

As for the industry of this remarkable people, in the 
thousand or so miles covered by our itinerary we have 
not seen one man or woman actually idle. Our kodaks 
have gone stale taking pictures of farmers, and their wo- 
men folk, working knee-deep in the mire of rice "paddies;" 
of coolies staggering through the congested streets under 
herculean burdens; of drivers of high wheeled carts, 
loaded with wares and produce of every conceivable sort, 

12 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



leading their patient bullocks to far destinations which 
at home would only be attempted with the aid of steam 
or gasoline; even of twelve-year old girls by the thou- 
sands, and many still younger, doing their twelve-hour 
shifts at the looms of the great cotton and silk mills — 
virtual slaves, with but two rest days a month. No 
loafers anywhere, no one standing about with hands in 
pockets waiting for something to turn up, no tramps and 
only one beggar, he, in the last stages of leprosy, an 
excusable one. 

Yet they tell us that Japan, like the rest of the world, 
is undergoing serious business depression and that there is 
much unemployment and unrest. If so, then the 
unemployed are in hiding now and those afflicted 
with "unrest" are mighty good actors. 

When it comes to the law-abiding character of the 
people, we, fresh from the land of "moonshine" and 
hold-ups, feel no disposition to boast. The only serious 
crime in all Japan which the papers have chronicled 
during the past fortnight is the assassination of 
Premier Hara, a tragedy which we narrowly escaped 
witnessing the night of our arrival at the Tokyo Central 
Station. It is possible that some of the country's nearly 
60,000,000 people have been held up or had their houses 
burglarized since we landed, but if so the fact 
has not been recorded by any of Japan's English papers, 
and they appear to be as keen for news as circulation- 
hungry newspapers are anywhere. 

Neither have we read of a single automobile accident 
since our arrival, and the only one we saw was a trivial 
affair where the victim, instead of taking our number and 

13 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



rushing off to a damage suit lawyer, picked himself up 
and meekly apologized for getting in the way. 

Lastly, we have seen but one intoxicated person, 
although Japan has no Eighteenth Amendment, and 
booze, both amber and red, is everywhere as easily 
obtainable as tea. 

While we wouldn't swap our little **100 foot front" 
in lovely Minneapolis for all Japan, were the trade con- 
ditioned on our living here the rest of our days, we can't 
help wondering whether the country which Commodore 
Perry introduced to the modern world but little more 
than half a century ago doesn't do a good many things 
rather better than we do them at home. 

Somehow we find it easier to talk about the Japanese 
than about Japan. Not that the latter has proved at all 
disappointing but rather that we have found its physical 
aspects so precisely what we have always pictured them 
that it seems impossible to say anything new or 
interesting on the subject. For example, we had com- 
mitted Mount Fuji to memory long years ago, hence 
when the great cone finally stood before us in all its 
symmetrical beauty we simply met an old acquaintance 
again. Yet we admired it none the less for that. There are 
loftier and far more rugged mountains in the world, but 
surely none other so patrician in its solitary splendor. 
It is a rank monopolist, for there are no competing 
mountains worthy of the name for hundreds of miles about. 

Neither are the temples particularly surprising, 
for who has not a fairly accurate picture in his mind's 
eye of the curling roofs, fantastic carvings, lacquered wood, 

14 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



graceful torii and myriad stone lanterns which go to 
make up the typical temple or shrine of old Nippon? 

Most of the outward aspects of the Mikado's 
kingdom — the charming mountain scenery, the rushing 
streams, the island-dotted Inland Sea, the intensively 
cultivated fields, the thousands upon thousands of shrines 
and temples, the countless bamboo cottages, looking more 
stage-like than real in their flimsiness — have become so 
familiar to us all ever since scribbling travelers first 
broke into Japan that we will not expatiate on them. 

Frankly, it is the people themselves that interest us 
mostly, and concerning them we are going away in a some- 
what puzzled frame of mind. Of one thing we are sure, 
that with all their odd mixture of East and West 
they possess a remarkable national consciousness; 
at all times they think and act in terms strictly Japanese. 
Patriotism is inculcated in the rising generation 
to an extent possibly never known in any other land, 
unless perhaps the Prussia of pre-war time. One of the 
commonest sights today in Japan is a class of students, 
garbed in the uniform of the public schools, being piloted 
by a professor of history to this or that spot made famous 
by some great event in the annals of the country. Every- 
where we have encountered these roving student bands, 
bent on learning the history of their nation at the places 
where it was made rather than from some dry text- 
book only. 

Every Japanese boy is taught to believe that 
not only can he "lick his weight in wild cats" but that he 
is more than a match for any two American boys. Yet 
we feel certain that Japan has no more thought of picking 

15 



Some Japanese Snapshots 



a quarrel with the United States than our government has 
of attacking England. What she probably has been figur- 
ing on in all her feverish military and naval programs has 
been to strengthen herself so that no Western nation will 
care to question very insistently any designs she may 
have for expansion in the East. 



16 



JAPAN, SEEN FROM KOREA (The "Chosen") 

November 1921 

OUR all too short month in Japan, Korea and 
China has been long enough at least to make us 
understand why the Japanese want more room in 
the world and why the Koreans and Chinese, like our 
California friends, want fewer Japanese in their midst. 

No one can so much as peep into Japan without 
realizing how tremendously over-populated it is and 
how exacting are the demands on every inch of its soil 
and, in normal times, on every ounce of its human energy. 
In an area 10,000 square miles smaller than that of Cal- 
ifornia nearly 57,000,000 people struggle for existence, 
more than half the population of our entire forty-eight 
states. Every year the stork adds to this huge family 
enough souls to repopulate New Mexico, Arizona and 
Nevada. If you doubt that last statement, just spend 
a week or two in Japan and notice how few of its women are 
to be seen without a bundle of babyhood on their backs. 

Four Japanese out of every five derive their living 
from the soil or from occupations directly dependent 
thereon, and as only about 15 per cent of the land is 
arable, the average farm owner must be content with 
less than 2J acres, while the average tenant farmer 
must somehow keep soul and body together on a single 
acre. Everywhere one sees patches of ground scarcely 
larger than a billiard table, many of them high up on 
steep mountain sides, cultivated with as much pains- 
taking care as an American woman would bestow on her 
pet flower bed. Yet with all this intensive agricultural 

17 



Japan, Seen From Korea (The ''Chosen') 

effort Japan fails to feed herself. Rice, the country's 
chief crop and the food mainstay of its people, is now 
imported in large quantities every year, a fact which 
was pointedly brought to our attention the other day 
when the boat on which we crossed the Pacific discharged 
33,000 bags of California rice at Yokohama docks. 

When one sees conditions like these at short range 
it is decidedly easier to understand and sympathize with 
Japan's desire for a larger place in the sun. At 
any rate, people like us who are privileged to live in 
America, where there are less than 36 inhabitants to the 
square mile, should not be too quick to question the 
aspirations or condemn the policies of a country each of 
whose square miles, on the average, represents a com- 
munity of 380 souls. After all, self-preservation is 
the first law of nature, and if we Americans were up 
against any such tremendous problem the chances are we 
would be no more inclined to treat it academically than 
are the Japanese. 

But Korea and China can scarcely be expected to 
sympathize with Japan in this particular. They have 
over-population problems and a host of other troubles of 
their own, and neither of them relishes the idea of carry- 
ing any part of Japan's load. In an area about equal to 
that of Minnesota, Korea (or "Chosen," as the Japanese 
have aptly re-christened it) supports, after a fashion, 
more than 17,000,000 people, while in an area approx- 
imately one-half the size of continental United States, 
China proper manages to keep something like 300,000,000 
souls a jump or two ahead of starvation. 

Yet we doubt if the economic phase of the case has had 

18 



Japariy Seen From Korea {The "Chosen'*) 

half as much to do with making Japan disliked and feared 
by these peoples of the Asiatic mainland as have the 
methods employed in carrying out her "peaceful con- 
quests" among them. However polite the Japanese 
may be to one another, however tactful, even obsequious, 
when dealing with Europeans and Americans, 
they certainly have displayed no such character- 
istics in their treatment of next-door neighbors, 
consequently you hear almost no one over here speak a 
good word for them. Everywhere they are regarded as 
crafty and designing, and, by many, as ruthless and 
cruel. Some of the stories one hears of Japanese 
brutality in Korea sound like the tales of mediaeval 
times, and while perhaps many of them should be liber- 
ally discounted, there is no question that the dreamy-eyed, 
placid-faced people of the "Hermit Kingdom" are today 
being ruled by the Nipponese with what we Americans 
would regard as an iron hand. 

The last of Korea's long line of kings is now a 
prisoner in the ancient palace of his dynasty at Seoul, 
his Japanese jailers according him the occasional high 
privilege of going to worship at the tombs of his ances- 
tors, while the people as a whole are subjected to a most 
obnoxious system of police espionage. We, ourselves, were 
made unpleasantly aware of the fact that even casual 
tourists passing through the country are continually 
under surveillance lest they give aid and comfort 
to the "rebels." 

Tactics of this sort have naturally jBlled the Koreans 
with resentment. One sees evidence of this, though 
generally mute evidence, at every turn. The platform 

19 



Japan, Seen From Korea {The '* C hosen'') 

of every railway station is paced by smartly uniformed 
Japanese soldiers of supercilious bearing, and the sullen 
looks bestowed on them by the villagers, who, like all 
small town folk the world over, dote on "seeing the 
train come in," reveal an unmistakable story of race 
hatred. 

Nevertheless, Japan is slowly but surely working a 
wonderful transformation in the 3,000-year-old country 
which she so coolly annexed ten years ago. The bulk of 
the Japanese at home may still be oriental to the core, 
but when their government starts out to make another 
oriental country toe the twentieth century mark, it goes 
about the job in a thoroughly occidental fashion. In 
the Japanese sections of Seoul, you will see more modern 
buildings, more well paved, well lighted streets and 
more evidence of scientific sanitation than in many an 
important town of old Japan itself. If these and 
numerous other improvements, including a vast amount 
of re-forestation, were being paid for by the Japanese 
rather than by the poverty-stricken, overtaxed Koreans, 
and if it were all being done in something of the same 
kindly spirit in which General Wood is handling the 
Filipinos, there might be hope for eventual good relations 
between the two peoples, but the trouble is that it is 
being done in a way which the Koreans themselves re- 
gard as decidedly arrogant. 

The Korean is a peaceable, good natured, happy-go- 
lucky fellow. It pains him to be hurried. The chief 
occupation of the male population, at least as we 
observe it in November, seems to be to wander aimlessly 
along the winding country paths from one village to 

20 



Japan, Seen From Korea {The "Choseri") 

another. All the way from Fusan in the south, up to 
Antung on the Yalu river in the north, the landscape was 
dotted with white-robed figures. The first time we 
noticed them, so far away that no movement was dis- 
cernible, we concluded that the tiny white specks against 
the green background were either tombstones or guide- 
posts, but a closer view proved them to be tall, digni- 
fied looking citizens whose chins were garnished with 
a random whisker or two, who carried pipes with stems 
three feet long and bowls the size of a chestnut, and 
whose attire seemingly consisted of a long white night- 
gown surmounted by a ridiculously small, black stove- 
pipe hat. 

No one ever gets his first '*close-up" of these Korean 
gentlemen of leisure without becoming secretly hilar- 
ious, yet despite their grotesque garb, melancholy 
countenances and odd mannerisms one cannot help 
liking them. They have a grave, quiet courtesy which 
is rather refreshing after so much effusive Japanese 
politeness. Whether Japan will be able to work 
any such change in the temperament and customs of 
these queer people as that which she undoubtedly is 
working in the face of the country they inhabit remains 
to be seen. It would surely be the irony of fate if Korea, 
which ages ago was the relay station through which Japan 
gained from China and India the foundation of her own 
civilization, should now learn from that ancient pupil 
the meaning of western civilization. 



21 



CHAOTIC CHINA 

December 1921 

POOR old China! Everyone over here is asking 
what is to become of her and we have thus far 
met no one bold enough to venture a cocksure answer 
to the question. For centuries she has been the world's 
great interrogation mark, and today she is more so than 
ever. The government itself, if the self-appointed 
bureaucrats at Peking can be dignified as such, is 
apparently bankrupt. When we were in that city 
the other day, the police were marching a body of prom- 
nent merchants through the streets with placards on 
their backs denouncing their refusal to accept at face 
value the depreciated paper money of two government- 
owned banks which had suspended the day before, the 
notice going on to warn the public that further offenses 
of the sort would be more drastically dealt with. Surely 
a novel, if not effective, way to stabilize a nation's 
currency ! 

It behooves the traveler in China nowadays to get 
rid of the bank bills of one city before proceeding to the 
next. Peking money is looked at askance in Mukden, 
Nanking money in Hankow and Shanghai money in 
Hongkong, while even the silver coins of the latter, 
British crown colony though it is, are handled gingerly 
by the tradesmen of Canton, 90 miles away. Everywhere 
too the money problem is immensely complicated by 
the daily fluctuations in foreign exchange. The be- 
wildered tourist, who spends half his time trying to keep 
his own small money matters straight, wonders how 

22 



Chaotic China 



importers and exporters can do business at all under such 
weird conditions. 

The civil war which is "raging" between North 
and South is costing far more in paper and ink than in 
powder and blood. In the entire eighteen provinces there 
are said to be more than 1,000,000 men under arms. Speci- 
mens of them are to be seen on every hand, but their seedy 
uniforms and rather sheepish countenances belie the 
warlike calling in which they are supposed to be engaged. 
Our guess is that if the provincial governors, whose 
hired mercenaries most of these "soldiers" are, would 
stop the practice of holding back their pay from three 
to four months, the whole make-believe army would 
promptly go on a spree and then muster itself out. And 
yet who knows, who can fathom an Oriental? 

These provincial or military governors, "tuchuns" 
they are called in the native vernacular, are the real rulers 
in China today. They are a law to themselves, and from 
all accounts most of them have become enormously 
wealthy through the sale of government positions and 
by the practice of every other conceivable form of graft, 
or "squeeze," as it is called in the Orient. Their al- 
legiance to the national government is purely perfunct- 
ory, and in their respective bailiwicks they rule as des- 
potically as any feudal baron of old. At the moment, the 
most powerful of these political chieftains is the "War 
Lord of Mukden," General Chang Tso-Kn, who holds 
sway over the Manchurian regions and who laid the 
foundation for his public career in years of hard and 
efficient work as a bandit! For a country which only 
a decade ago threw off the yoke of an ancient despot- 

23 



Chaotic China 



ism and which since then has ostensibly, been a repubUc, 
these are surely fantastic conditions. 

It is all a most incomprehensible mess. No one 
pretends to say what the outcome will be. Most of the 
foreign residents with whom we have talked express the 
belief that the Chinese riddle will never be solved until 
the Powers unite in forcibly putting through some 
sweeping program of reform. On the other hand, the 
Peking representative of the Northcliffe papers told us 
(and he told Lord Northcliffe himself the same thing 
when the latter was here last week) that any such attempt 
on the part of outsiders would surely fail unless it 
were backed by at least 5,000,000 trained troops. This 
journalist has lived among the Chinese for twenty-three 
years and he believes that a move of that kind would 
instantly solidify all of the contending factions and 
again raise the old cry against the "foreign devil." At 
present Japan enjoys the distinction of being China's 
sole foreign devil, and such racial hatred as these 
naturally docile yellow men are capable of is in conse- 
quence centered on the shrewd little men of Nippon, 
greatly to the latter's discomfiture in the loss of much 
valuable trade. 

In spite of all the political and financial chaos, the 
great mass of the people seem to be going about their 
daily work as usual, much, we imagine, as they have been 
in the habit of doing for ages. One simply cannot view 
the busy life of China's teeming millions, in city and 
country, on land, river and sea, without feeling that 
how ever corrupt or insolvent its nominal government may 
be, the nation itself is still very much of a going concern, 

24 



Chaotic China 



sound in heart and limb, if not in head. One also feels 
that the rank and file of the people have but little compre- 
hension of what their self-constituted political spokes- 
men are doing, and even less real interest in the subject. 
We'll wager most of the Chinese don't care a 
whoop whether they are ruled by Ming emperor, 
Manchu empress, parliamentary president or provin- 
cial war lord. From time immemorial they have 
been so accustomed to misrule that they continue to 
expect and endure it quite as a matter of course. The 
small, infinitely small, minority who are educated and 
enlightened may in time work out the country's salva- 
tion, but those who ought to know say that the tendency 
with many even of this class is corruptly to seek power 
and wealth for themselves regardless of what becomes of 
the nation. Obviously the whole Chinese puzzle is on 
the lap of the gods! 

We are taking away a wonderfully vivid picture of 
a nation at work, of a nation where literally every one 
works. Japan seemed to us the last word in physical 
toil, but after two weeks in China's human hive we 
are forced to revise our ideas. There appears to be no 
task too menial, no exertion too great, no hours too long 
and no wage too low for these marvelous people. Most 
of the throngs one encounters in the crowded streets 
seem veritable beasts of burden, carrying, carrying, 
eternally carrying. Bent men and women of seventy with 
line-seamed faces, together with children of both sexes 
scarcely old enough to toddle, struggle for the highway 
privilege alongside those of sturdier years. In the 
almost complete absence of railways, trams and power- 

25 



Chaotic China 



driven trucks, this endless chain of human vehicles 
constitutes the country's main transportation system, 
and a most flexible and practical system it is, even though 
slow. 

Coming back to Peking one evening from a trip to 
the famed Summer Palace of the old Empress Dowager, 
we met a conveyance which in many parts of China is 
still the common one for handling passenger traffic. It 
was a wheelbarrow, and the human motor propelling it 
had for his cargo no less than six "commuters" return- 
ing to their suburban hovels from the day's work in 
town. A moment later we overtook more than 100 
coolies, together with a dozen bullocks, ponies and 
donkeys, all indiscriminately harnessed together, hauling 
a gigantic wheeled contraption on which was a 
huge monolith fully 50 feet in length and whose weight 
must certainly have run into scores of tons. 

No matter what the back-breaking burden may be, 
whether a towering load of hay, enough household goods 
to half fill a furniture van, enormous bales of merchan- 
dise, a barrel of water, or sufficient fish, meat or vege- 
tables to stock a small market, the patient Chinese porters, 
both men and women, trot cheerfully along under its 
staggering weight to the rhythm of their own weird 
songs. And to what end? To earn 25 cents "Mex," 
or, on an extraordinarily successful day, perhaps as much 
as 40 cents, with which to buy enough food to 
provide motive power for another day of like toil! 
The items of clothes and lodging are negligible, the 
common solution of the former problem in summer 
time being to go without, and in winter time to add a 

26 



Chaotic China 



fiftieth patch to the garment which already resembles a 
crazy quilt; lodgings, on the other hand, can easily be 
procured by the simple expedient of falling asleep in 
one's tracks behind any old, rent free, mud wall. 

Of course these extreme conditions do not obtain 
among the better class of artisans and skilled workers, nor 
among the comparatively well-to-do small shopkeepers; 
but even these great "middle classes" have incomes and a 
standard of living which would appear beggarly in the 
extreme to the poorest paid classes of American common 
labor. Any Chinaman who can average 25 cents gold a 
day, the year around, is on Easy Street. 

We had never dreamed until visiting Canton how 
many vocations there are in the world. The Cantonese, 
1,500,000 of whom are herded together in a space 
much smaller than that occupied by Minneapolis, 
seem to manufacture and sell every conceivable thing 
under the heavens, from tooth brushes and artificial 
eyeballs to the most beautiful mother-of-pearl goods; 
from wonderfully embroidered shawls to splendidly 
hand-carved furniture; from exquisitely wrought 
jewelry to the most delicately woven silks and satins. 
In nearly every case the factory, the store and their 
owner's dwelling are all combined in a single one or two 
story building whose ten-foot front faces a street so 
narrow that you can almost span it with your 
outstretched arms. Along these winding, tunnel -like 
alleyways there swarms from early dawn till late night 
an endless stream of shouting, singing, struggling, 
sweating, ill-smelling, but always good natured, human- 
ity. Pandemonium is the only word for it all, 

27 



Chaotic China 



yet it is the purposeful and practical sort of pande- 
monium that one associates with a riotous boiler shop. 
When witnessing the kaleidoscopic scenes of these 
old Chinese cities, the primitive life of their inhabitants 
and the even more primitive life of those in the sur- 
rounding country districts who supply them with fish, 
fowl, flesh, fruit, rice, tea and all manner of queer looking 
and queerer tasting garden truck, one cannot help feeling 
that it is all pretty much as it must have been five 
centuries ago, and, barring miracles, pretty much as it 
will be five centuries hence. It is to be hoped that 
Rockefeller foundations, missionary boards, foreign 
"consortiums," Washington conferences and other 
progressive agencies will somehow bring this ancient 
yet still virile country into step with the times, 
but our own reaction to the strange scenes and 
experiences of the past fortnight leads us to venture 
the doubt that much of concrete or wide-spread value 
can be expected from their efforts for many generations 
to come. However pessimistic or reactionary it may 
sound, we risk the prediction that no one now living 
will ever see China, except in spots, essentially different 
from what it is today. Yet if it should some day wake 
up and join the modern procession the rest of the world 
had better look out, for John Chinaman is not only 
naturally intelligent and clever but he has the good 
nature and patience of a faithful dog, the endurance 
of a horse and the industry of a beaver. These qual- 
ities, coupled with a phenomenal ability to subsist on 
almost nothing, would make him a mighty dangerous 
competitor should he ever enter the world's commercial 
game in earnest. 



28 



Chaotic China 



Vastly interesting and impressive as are the neglected 
and rapidly decaying palaces, temples and pagodas of 
China, its many monumental relics of the waning faiths of 
Confucius and Buddha, its historic Forbidden City, its 
wonderful, 2,500-mile Great Wall, its marvelous National 
Museum collection of porcelain, jade, damascene, lacquer 
and bronze — all telling an eloquent story of the nation's 
past greatness — we are leaving the country with a less 
keen and lasting impression of those things than of the 
remarkable traits of its present inhabitants and of the 
high-pressure lives they are leading under seemingly 
impossible conditions. 

The typical pictures which we shall most vividly 
recall are of a peasant returning from his fields at twilight 
with a primitive plow on his back and a tired water 
buffalo or donkey in tow; of a bent, wrinkled old woman 
trudging gaily along a country road with impossible 
mountains of straw balanced across her shoulders; of 
people of all ages and both sexes cheerfully doing all 
manner of team work in harness with four-footed beasts 
of every description; of fishermen hauling their nets and 
of shepherds tending their flocks; of queer-looking craft 
by the thousands on which father, mother, grandparents 
and children, who know no other home, take turns in 
manning the sails and handling the tiller; of shrill- voiced 
keepers piloting their feathered wards home from the duck 
ponds at nightfall; and of the myriads of city toilers in- 
cessantly pulsing through the crowded streets or laboring 
eighteen hours a day at unheard of tasks in their stuffy 
little shops. 

Work, work, work — everywhere and always, work! 
29 



Chaotic China 



This is the outstanding impression we get of China. 
That, and the universal willingness and cheerfulness of 
the workers. 

Perhaps, now that manual labor is no longer 
fashionable in America, we may one of these days repeal 
the Exclusion Act and avail ourselves of some of these 
willing workers, thereby incidentally contributing our 
mite toward the solution of the baffling Far East question ! 
Who knows .^ 



30 



JAVA— THE GARDEN OF THE EAST 

December 1921 

ANYONE who, on account of its proximity to 
Sumatra and Borneo, pictures Java as a jungle- 
overgrown East Indies island, the home of tigers, 
elephants and head-hunters, would get something of a jolt 
if, as we write, he were to look in on this lovely mountain 
resort of Tosari, to which Dutch society folk from the 
torrid coast towns have fled for a cool Christmas holiday . 
Most of them have come in high-powered American cars, 
over automobile roads that would do credit to California, 
and have brought with them an up-to-date array of 
sport and evening clothes. When tired of tennis, 
billiards or bridge, or of dancing to the latest jazz, they fall 
to with genuine glee club zest and sing American college 
songs. Had we eyes and ears only for these immediate 
surroundings it would not be at all difficult to imagine 
ourselves foregathering with a company of friends at 
some summer hotel or country club on our own side of 
the globe. 

But the wealth of tropical vegetation all about, 
the sight of smoking volcanoes in the distance and the 
occasional rumble of a faint-hearted earthquake remind 
us that we are far from home. Then, the spectacle of dark- 
skinned waiters and * 'bell-hops" scurrying to and fro in 
bare feet, of hungry sparrows perched expectantly on the 
backs of dining-room chairs, and nimble lizards ambling 
gaily over the walls of our sleeping rooms (on occasion 
making themselves at home in our beds, if the sworn, 
literally sworn, testimony of certain members of the 

31 



Java — The Garden of the East 



party is to be credited) go to prove beyond question that 
we are sojourning at no American resort. 

The romantic Java of our school days is, alas, no more. 
The last Javanese elephant, the shrunken, moth-eaten 
survivor of a once mighty race, is now enjoying a placid 
old age down at the palace stables of the Sultan of 
Djokjakarta, while the tigers, leopards and deadly snakes 
of the one-time jungle have all disappeared with the 
jungle itself. But there remains a vast menagerie of 
small animal life — ants, bugs, bats, beetles, lizards and 
other winged and crawling pests too numerous to 
index — with which no tourist can fail to become inti- 
mately acquainted. These compensate in a measure 
for the dearth of more heroic and dangerous beasts. 

Java is a miniature world in itself, and a most 
paradoxical one. 

Can you imagine a country where the bulk of the 
inhabitants are, to all outward appearances, scarcely 
half-civilized, yet where steam railways, macadam roads, 
automobiles, electric lights and telephones are an old 
story? Can you visualize a great society in which 99 
people out of every 100 know little or nothing of 
schools, churches, newspapers or governmental affairs, 
yet in which there is vastly less crime, vastly more respect 
for constituted authority, than in Europe, or even 
America .^^ Can you conceive of a people who were at 
one time so deeply religious that now, after the lapse of 
twelve centuries, the ruins of their temples and altars rank 
among the acknowledged wonders of the world, yet a 
people who today display far less evidence of religious 
faith of any sort than a tribe of primitive sun-worshippers 



32 



Java — The Garden of the East 



would? Or can you conjure a region where tropical heat 
and humidity make life almost unbearable the year 
around, yet where an hour's journey from almost any 
point will bring you into the temperate zone, so con- 
venient from end to end of the sweltering lowlands are the 
cool mountain heights? Finally, can you picture an equa- 
torial island, in size but little larger than Cuba (its actual 
area is little more than half that of Minnesota), swarming 
with nearly 40,000,000 dark-hued natives, more than 
the combined population of the Atlantic Coast states 
from Maine to Florida, all held gently but firmly in leash 
by a mere handful of white people hailing from the chilly 
shores of the North Sea, half a world away? These are 
some of the contradictions so puzzling to those 
travelers who leave the beaten path long enough to visit 
this remarkable spot. 

Barring the half dozen years or so during the 
Napoleonic era when the British ruled it, Java has been 
a Dutch possession for nearly four centuries, and during 
the last of those centuries, at least, the Hollanders have 
certainly managed the country with tact and success. 
They have permitted the native sultans to retain nom- 
inally much of their old time authority, and it is through 
those points of contact, and with the aid of less than 
10,000 imported troops, that the actual governing is 
done. The establishments of these princely pen- 
sioners, one of whom has a retinue of 15,000 people 
(including a bevy of harem ladies variously estimated at 
from 30 to 3,000 in number) are maintained in much 
of their ancient splendor. But behind each gilded 
throne stands a quiet, determined, business-like repre- 

33 



Java — The Garden of the East 



sentative of the Netherlands whose word is law. 
Incongruous as such an arrangement may seem, it appears 
to work beautifully. The puppet rulers are evidently 
quite willing to be supported in luxury and in the con- 
tinued enjoyment of such comic opera titles as "Spike of 
Heaven," "Nail of the Universe," etc., without incurring 
any real responsibility. And the rank and file of the native 
population, to whom firearms are forbidden, are probably 
not keen to try conclusions with soldiers who, however 
small their numbers, are abundantly supplied with 
machine guns. 

For reasons best known to themselves, the Dutch 
have from the first looked askance at missionary activity, 
not only in Java but in all their other East Indies pos- 
possessions, and in consequence the number of native 
Christians hereabouts is almost negligible. Twelve 
hundred years ago Java was the recognized Buddhist 
stronghold of the world, the marvelous shrine at 
Bourobudur, almost as large as the greatest of the 
Egyptian pyramids and far more beautiful because of 
its miles of bas-relief sculptures, unmistakably attest- 
ing that fact. But when Buddhism was supplanted in 
these regions by Brahmanism, and the latter in turn by 
Mohammedanism, the Javanese, apparently surfeited with 
oriental creeds, seem to have lost all interest in spiritual 
things. 

While many are still nominal followers of Islam 
there are probably mighty few who would recognize a 
copy of the Koran if they saw it. The vast majority 
impress one as having no thought or aim in life except 
to do 365 days part-time work each year for the sake of 

34 



Java — The Garden of the East 



365 days of meager sustenance. With no Sabbath days 
of rest and comparatively few fete days, the regular 
afternoon siesta constitutes the chief recreation of the 
populace — that and the everlasting chewing of enormous 
cuds of betel-nut. The American consul at Batavia told 
us that in his judgment no like number of people can be 
found on the globe who are so resigned to their lot or 
who offer so uninviting a field both to missionaries and 
to political agitators. The "unrest" which has so upset 
most of the world evidently has not yet reached Java. 

Yet even in this far-away corner of the map there is 
genuine business depression, and here as elsewhere our 
old friend H. C. L., has put in an appearance. Our native 
guide told us that the immaculate white duck suit he was 
wearing had cost him seven times as much as similar ones 
did six years ago. Rice, the staple Javanese food, costs 
three times as much as it did before the war. On the 
other hand, the price of raw rubber has declined to a 
point where the planters are taking drastic measures to 
curtail its production, while the sugar and copra growers 
are up against the same demoralized market conditions 
which confront their unhappy competitors everywhere 
in the tropics. 

To what extent this distressing economic situation 
is reflected in the daily lives of the masses who people 
this human sardine box no casual observer can say. 
Apparently they are happy and contented, as perhaps 
might be expected in a land where nature has been so 
prodigal — where the Almighty has so ordered things 
that bread grows on trees and backs need no clothing. 
If, perchance, the native Javanese cannot afford to eat 



35 



Java — The Garden of the East 



rice, or if he has no bread-fruit or cocoanut trees in his 
yard, he can at least subsist on bananas, of which 
authorities say 4,000 pounds can be grown, practically 
without effort, on the same amount of ground that an 
American farmer would laboriously till in order to raise 
99 pounds of potatoes or 33 pounds of wheat. 

But we are not in the least qualified, on the strength 
of a fortnight's "once over," to analyze either the econ- 
omic, political or religious status of this tropical people, 
and in any case we much prefer to dwell on their wond- 
erful environment. 

Java has been called the ''Garden of the East," but 
to our notion the phrase is a feeble one, for there are gar- 
dens and gardens, and this particular one is so absolutely 
in a class by itself that it deserves a much stronger simile. 
Some gardens are chiefly productive, others chiefly beau- 
tiful, but the 600-mile stretch of this enchanted garden 
possesses both of those characteristics to a superlative 
degree. A rich, volcanic soil and a hot, moist climate, 
together with an abundance of cheap but scientifically 
directed Malay, Chinese and native labor, combine to 
make it yield in profusion almost everything known to the 
vegetable kingdom. Its vast sugar, coffee, tobacco 
and rubber plantations, interspersed everywhere with rice 
and tapioca fields, cocoanut and banana groves and 
forests of teak and other costly woods, have all seemingly 
been laid out with such precision and in such delightful 
contrasts that as one motors along the well-kept highways 
beneath stately arches of kanari and weringen trees the 
feeling becomes irresistible that some vast pleasure park 
or private estate has been thrown open for public in- 

36 



Java — The Garden of the East 



spection, — that one is privileged to view the handiwork of 
some master landscape artist who has centered his 
thought on the weaving of a thousand lovely vistas into 
a harmonious general design rather than on the prosaic 
and practical job of raising crops. 

Even the crude native architecture blends perfectly 
into the picture. Individtially, and on close inspection, 
the home of the average Javanese, with its motley 
assortment of dogs, chickens, pigs, goats and cattle, all 
domiciled together on terms of perfect equality with 
naked children and more than half-naked grown-ups, 
makes no appeal to an aesthetic taste, but when seen 
collectively, and beyond the range of smell, the basket- 
like houses with their thatched roofs of palm leaves and 
walls of woven bamboo are extremely picturesque. 
They add just the right touch to the landscape as they 
cluster together in little kampongs, or villages, half 
hidden by the sheltering foliage of the ubiquitous banana 
grove. 

This custom of burying the villages in dense thickets 
to escape the fierce rays of the equatorial sun inclines 
the stranger to question the official statement that there 
are upwards of 37,000,000 people on the island. He will 
frequently speed past villages containing a thousand or 
more souls without in the least suspecting the real size 
of the community, so completely concealed in the trees 
are their toy-like huts. Java has few sizable cities, 
but its country districts literally reek with humanity, the 
average density of its population per square mile being 
more than double that of over-crowded Japan and twenty 
times that of the United States! Java has no "drift to 

37 



Java — The Garden of the East 



the city" problem to contend with, for it is itself all city. 
The best way to get a true appreciation of this fact is 
to motor into the country at daybreak, as we have done 
on several occasions in order to escape the mid-day heat. 
At that gray hour, all rural Java is on march to field and 
market, and every arterial highway is almost as crowded as 
Nicollet Avenue at noontime. It is a sight no one can 
faithfully describe without being accused of exaggeration. 

Nothing in Java's glorious garden more quickly cap- 
tures the eye than the rice fields, or sawtohs, as the 
natives call them. In this tropical climate, the 
planting, cultivating and harvesting of rice go on 
side by side the whole year around, and in con- 
sequence everywhere one sees the grain at all stages of 
its development and in every imaginable shade of 
green and gold. In many places the formation of the 
fields themselves, — their engineering construction one 
might almost say — is scarcely less pleasing than their 
color effects. The Javanese fairly shingle the sides 
of their hills and mountains with rice terraces, and when 
these are covered with water (rice is commonly planted 
under water a foot deep) the effect is no less startling 
than beautiful, especially when viewed transversely or 
from above. It is as if some landscape wizard had built 
a huge pyramid of narrow lakes whose contents ought, 
by all the laws of gravity, to go cascading away, but 
which instead cling in uncanny fashion to the sloping 
sides of the edifice. In Japan, rice culture is a farming 
proposition; in Java it impresses one as being almost a 
manufacturing proposition, carried on in a sort of glori- 
fied out-door industrial plant. 

38 



Java — The Garden of the East 



Java has also been called the "Switzerland of the 
East," and with no little reason. Although her moun- 
tains are neither as high nor as rugged as the Alps, they 
appear almost as imposing for, like the peaks of Puget 
Sound, their full stature is revealed from every sea level 
pointof vantage; and the beauty of these great cones is 
mightily enhanced by the misty, low -hanging clouds 
which, like fleecy drapery, festoon without quite conceal- 
ing their alluring forms. 

Perhaps nowhere else on the globe are there so many 
volcanoes, both active and extinct, within so small an 
area. Certainly nowhere else do equally great 
masses of humanity tempt fate by continuing to live on 
a volcanic lid of such bad repute. Not every year, nor 
every decade, does a Javanese volcano let go, yet the 
thing does happen often enough, and on a suflBciently 
terrific scale, to constitute a standing menace, particu- 
larly to those venturesome natives who persist in grow- 
ing wheat, corn, potatoes and other northern crops far up 
the mountain slopes within speaking distance of the smoul- 
dering craters. How these people avoid falling off their 
tiny, almost perpendicular fields is a mystery. One 
would think they would need the safety belt and swinging 
perch of an office building window-cleaner in order to 
escape disaster. 

Yesterday we climbed a 9,200-foot eminence to see the 
sun rise over the famous volcano of Bromo. We left 
the hotel at 2 A. M., the men on ponies and the women 
in chairs, each of the latter being manned by eight noisy 
coolies. It was a cold, dark trip up the winding seven- 
mile trail to our observation point, but the spectacle 

39 



Java — The Garden of the East 



which greeted us when we finally reached there — when 
the sea of clouds at our feet began drifting away and the 
cavernous throat of Bromo, belching tremendous volumes 
of smoke and ashes, gradually emerged from its somber 
wrappings — amply repaid us for the loss of a night's sleep. 
There may be a more glorious sight somewhere on earth, 
but chronic globe-trotters say not. Even some of our 
own party who have hitherto sworn by the Grand Canyon 
of the Colorado are inclined to transfer their allegiance 
to fiery Bromo's tropical sunrise. 

All in all, Java possesses a most remarkable com- 
bination of attractions. Externally, it presents something 
of the same finished appearance that Americans, particu- 
larly those from our Western states, are so quick to note 
and admire in Europe. Almost everywhere one goes, 
things look picked up and in place, as befits a land 
long governed by orderly Hollanders who themselves 
have added much to the beauty of the scene by frequent 
architectural splashes that remind you strongly of Delft, 
the Hague or Amsterdam. If one is especially interested 
in exotic flowers, shrubs, trees, and fruits, and is not 
satisfied with a hurried glimpse of the God-made botan- 
ical garden which is Java itself, he can leisurely study 
such things in detail, all properly labelled, in the man- 
made park at Buitenzorg, which authorities say 
is the greatest botanical garden in the world. If he 
is chiefly interested in folks, particularly queer and 
unaccountable folks, here is the place to come, for the 
country is alive with them; and their beautiful home- 
made batik worn as skirts or sarongs, by both men 
and women, and as turbans by the men only, add a 

40 



Java — The Garden of the East 



charming touch of color to a picture which nature her- 
self has already colored so lavishly. 

The manufacture of hatik is distinctly a Javanese 
specialty, one of the few ancient arts of the race which 
have not been lost. The hammered copper, the beautiful 
figured leather goods and the wonderful carved tortoise- 
shell stuff displayed in every shop also testify 
to the inherited love of the artistic possessed by the 
people. The one unaccountable thing about them 
all is that they are apparently content to live such a 
hand-to-mouth existence, with no political consciousness, 
no real religious convictions and not the slightest curiosity 
about what is going on in the outside world. We hazard 
the guess that 10,000,000 of them never heard of the 
Great War and that most of the other 27,000,000 don't 
know to this day who fought it — which perhaps is not a 
particularly wild guess considering Holland's neutrality 
during the late unpleasantness and her obvious behef 
that too much enlightenment of far-away colonial 
subjects is not good policy. 



41 



THE CROSSROADS OF THE EASTERN SEAS 

January 1922 

IF one's only object in making a tour of the world is 
to observe strange peoples, then much time, energy and 
money can be saved by going straight to Singapore and 
there parking oneself on the broad, well-shaded veranda 
of the Raffles Hotel. From that comfortable vantage 
ground, more varieties of the human species can be seen 
in a given space of time than anywhere else on the globe. 
It is the only habitable spot in the world where an 
ethnological congress could be convened on short notice 
with absolute assurance of a quorum, for past it there 
flows an endless stream of the races — Chinese, Malays, 
Burmans, Bengalis, Tamils, Sinhalese, Japanese, Siamese 
Arabs, Javanese, Turks, Armenians and pretty much 
all the rest of the tribes of man save those from the polar 
regions. 

Singapore, as a sort of racial clearing house, was 
inevitable. The little island on which it stands lies 
just off the tip of the Malay Peninsula, that long, 
sinuous arm which Asia thrusts into the southern seas 
almost to the equator and which must be rounded by 
every ship plying between the ports of Europe and those 
of the Far East. It also lies at the entrance of the Straits 
of Milacca, that great thoroughfare which the ships of 
Australia, New Zealand and Java have for ages traversed 
in reaching the shores of India. Situated at such a 
maritime crossroads as this, where every passing vessel 
drops anchor in quest of cargo, provisions or fuel, what 
wonder is it that the sun-baked streets and palm-fringed 

42 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



esplanades of Singapore are thronged day and night with 
people from the ends of the earth? 

But if you want to witness this passing show 
with seeing eyes — if you are really keen to know 
who's who in the kaleidoscopic pageant and where he 
comes from — you should first make a study of racial 
colorings so that you may be able to identify and properly 
classify the many shades of yellow and brown revealed 
by the bare backs and legs of the surging crowd. You 
should also be able to discriminate intelligently between 
a pair of oriental eyes, slanted at a certain angle, and 
those whose slant is almost imperceptibly different. 
You should know why men who coil their waist-long hair 
in a knot at the back of the neck have no racial relation- 
ship to those of otherwise quite similar appearance who 
gather equally long hair in a knot on the top of the 
head. The number and kind of ear, nose and finger 
rings and, in the case of women, the number and kind of 
bracelets, anklets and toe rings also throw important 
light on the nationality, social status and religious creed 
of the wearer. 

Yet not all of these hurrying thousands display 
shining bare skins, grotesquely dressed hair or fantastic- 
ally wrought jewelry. Here and there the colorful 
procession is punctuated by the spotless white suit and sun 
helmet of some well garbed European or American, for 
be it remembered that the equator lies only 80 miles 
away and that from 9 a. m. till 4 p. m. the year round 
no sane white man ever frequents these blistering pave- 
ments in anything but tropical attire. 

This much we must say in defense of the 
43 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



equator: journeying to and from Java we "crossed the 
line" both times at night, yet in neither instance 
did we experience anywhere near as much discomfort 
as on many a suffocating July night at home. On 
the return voyage we actually passed from the south- 
ern to the northern hemisphere under woolen blankets ! 
Even at midday, when in the shade, we have found 
the heat in these latitudes far less oppressive than it was 
a few weeks ago in the China Sea, a thousand miles to the 
north. There, for a stretch of forty-eight hours, we 
kept such even pace with a hot following wind that the 
stuffy cabins of the old P. & O. tub on which we were 
sailing became almost uninhabitable. 

We must not speak slightingly of the good ship 
*'Samoli," or of the line to which it belongs, for during 
the war the former did valiant service as a hospital ship, 
while the latter suffered the loss of more than two score 
of its great fleet of passenger and freight carriers. In 
an informal but intensely gripping address to the first- 
cabin passengers at tiffin one day, the Samoli's brave 
captain told of some of the gruesome scenes which had 
been enacted among the very surroundings that then 
seemed so quiet and peaceful; how the smoking room 
had been converted into an operating room, which at 
times, when the anaesthetics gave out, became a ghastly 
chamber of horrors; how the ship lay for weeks directly 
under the guns of the Turkish forts during the fierce 
fighting at Gallipolis; and how there, and in many other 
places, she had time and again miraculously escaped 
destruction from gun fire, mines and torpedoes. After 
listening to this thrilling story we tried to forget our 

44 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



petty discomforts, feeling, in the captain's phrase, that 
we were on sacred ground. 

Speaking of discomforts, whatever modern luxuries 
the English boats now in commission in the Orient 
may lack, their cabins and berths are at least clean, 
the food is abundant and more than tolerably good, 
the service is excellent and the ships' officers are far 
better mixers than are their chesty brethren on the 
palatial liners of the North Atlantic. 

The genuine trepidation with which we approached 
this stage of our journey proved entirely groundless. 
The waters we have been sailing of late have been like 
a mill pond. During the past fortnight we have scarcely 
seen a whitecap and in consequence not even the star 
poor sailor of the party has missed any of her meals. 
At another season of the year, when the deadly typhoon 
is in action, there would, no doubt, be a very different 
story to tell. 

To the comfort of steady decks has been added the 
delight of sailing a veritable inland sea where hardly for 
an hour have we been out of sight of land. Steaming 
south to Java, from Singapore, the low-lying coast jungles 
of Sumatra were much of the time in plain view, while 
Occasional glimpses of Borneo's bold headlands in the 
opposite direction brought out every available pair of 
binoculars in pretended search for its traditional wild 
men. Then, returning from the far end of Java, our 
small but very comfortable Dutch steamer skirted the 
shores of that latter-day Garden of Eden all the way 
from Sourabaya to Batavia, affording a constantly 
shifting panorama of cloud- wreathed mountains. Leav- 



45 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



ing Singapore's crowded harbor for Rangoon we 
threaded our way through a maze of islands whose 
beauty far surpasses that of the famed Thousand 
Islands of the St. Lawrence. And now, far up in that 
man-sized sea which, for some unaccountable reason, 
early geographers dubbed the "Bay" of Bengal, 
our course lies through a channel so narrow that, to 
the east, the rugged promontories of the Malay 
Peninsula are plainly discernible, while to the west, 
our glasses afford most interesting close-up views of a 
seemingly endless succession of islets, some of them 
verdure-clad, coral-reefed and inhabited by nomadic 
tribes of fishermen, others mere rock upheavals wholly 
barren of both animal and vegetable life. From end to 
end of this great passage-way one enjoys all the charm of 
a sea voyage while escaping the monotony of an un- 
broken horizon, that tiresome accompaniment of most 
ocean trips. The continual alternation of land and sea 
and the consequent scurrying about for maps and field 
glasses keep us constantly on the qui vive. 

The only bit of real excitement we have had on 
this leg of the journey came the other day in the Java Sea 
when the cry of "Man overboard!" went up. Instantly 
the "Rumpius" began a sharp swing to starboard and in 
an incredibly short time was doubling back on her tracks, 
a manoeuvre by no means easy even for a small vessel 
when under the momentum of a 20-knot speed. After a 
tense five minutes or so a tiny black speck was seen 
bobbing about on the waves far ahead, whereupon the 
bridge promptly signalled for"full speed astern." This 
order slowed the ship to a pace which enabled a boat's crew 



46 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



of sturdy Dutch sailors to lower materially the local 
quick launching record and then to give an exhibition of 
oarsmanship that would have won applause at a Yale- 
Harvard regatta. When finally the limp and almost 
lifeless cause of all the excitement was lifted from the 
water a round of cheers and many "Thank Gods" went 
up from the anxious spectators. The fact, as afterwards 
developed, that the rescued man was a coolie steerage 
passenger whose opium slumbers had been rudely 
interrupted by a lurch of the ship, lessened no one's 
enthusiasm over the skillful manner in which the 
affair was handled. Then, too, "a man's a man for a' 
that." 

Most of the boats plying between Singapore, 
Rangoon and Calcutta make at least a few hours' stop 
at the small island of Penang, which lies just off the 
southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula. The city 
of Penang itself was once Great Britain's chief 
outpost in these regions, and even today, long after 
it has yielded both political and commercial supremacy to 
Singapore, it maintains an air of queenly superiority 
over the latter and all other Straits Settlements rivals. 
The city, as we saw it in the golden sunshine of a clear 
January morning, seemed a place where one might well 
wish to pass his proverbial last days, although after 
the intense heat of Singapore and the cramped quarters 
aboard ship we may have been overly susceptible to its 
charms. 

We landed in a sampan, that universal water taxi of 
the Orient, and its fantastically garbed oarsmen chat- 
tered like a lot of Venetian gondoliers as they deftly 

47 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



worked their way to the quay through a swarm 
of ocean-going vessels, fishing smacks and junks. The 
motor drive which followed was one long to be remembered. 
It took us through the clean, well paved streets of the 
European business district, lined with white, dazzling 
white, and very substantial looking buildings, out into 
the suburban residence section where the spacious villas 
of government officials, wealthy tradesmen, bankers and 
planters, all embowered among waving cocoanut trees 
along a rock-strewn shore, command superb views of 
the distant headlands across the bay. 

An hour later we encountered scenes so totally 
different that it was hard to believe we had not suddenly 
been transported to another world, for leaving the 
winding ocean drive at the further side of the island we 
returned to the city by a more direct route and in doing 
so passed through the native quarter where, for block 
after block, we again saw the familiar scenes of Peking and 
Canton, and also, if we guess correctly, were treated to a 
"pre- view" of many of the scenes which await us in Burma 
and India. For local color and a hodge-podge of national- 
ities the native quarter of Penang runs that of Singapore 
a close second. 

The guide books all dilate on the city's great 
botanical garden, and doubtless with good reason, but 
truth compels us to confess that we passed it by. This 
partly because we are now pretty well fed up on botanical 
gardens, and partly because we had chanced to hear of 
a much more curious though decidedly less beautiful 
sight nearby, one that struck us as being rather more 
worth while under the circumstances. It was nothing 

48 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



less than an astonishing marble temple to which the 
Chinese population of Penang, or at least a considerable 
portion thereof, regularly goes for the worship of reptiles ! 
This pagan sanctuary stands in the outskirts of the 
city in a lovely setting of tropical foliage. It has stood 
there for ages, and while for architectural considerations 
alone it well merits a visit, its chief interest to the tourist 
lies in the slimy menagerie it contains. Believe it 
or not as you may, we counted no less than 51 live 
snakes comfortably parked about that holy place! 
Several of them were gracefully entwined among the 
sacred images and other paraphernalia of the altar itself, 
others were coiled about the carved pillars supporting 
the dome, while the glistening, mottled skins of still 
others gaily festooned the ancient archways. We 
stopped counting at 51 simply because time forbade 
taking a more complete inventory. Doubtless every 
nook and cranny of the heathenish edifice houses a well- 
fed, contented, and therefore well-behaved reptile, deified 
by the benighted people who frequent the place. 

After staying awhile to watch these evidently 
sincere worshippers, and to speculate on their mental 
processes, we hurried out into the glorious sunshine of 
the one true God, feeling very much in accord with 
Mark Twain's thought when he said '*The more I see 
of people the better I like dogs." For a moment we 
were inclined to take back all the nice things we have 
been saying about the Chinese. But recalling 
that we had seen no such revolting sight 
in China, also that pagan religions are decidedly 
on the wane in that country, we concluded that John 

49 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



Chinaman as an alien in other lands is not an 
altogether safe criterion by which to judge those of 
his fellows who have stuck to the native soil. 

Chinese who emigrate come mainly from the ex- 
tremes of society, the worst class of the population and the 
best. The coolies who have flocked to the Phillipines, 
the Malay States and the islands of the south seas are 
apparently the dregs of the race, but along with them 
have come thousands of keen, intelligent traders who 
already are a serious menace to the white man's com- 
mercial control in these regions, and many of them have 
amassed fortunes. They maintain elaborate establish- 
ments, dress in the latest European style and speed to and 
from business in high-powered automobiles. They seem 
in every way "to the manner born.'* 

Perhaps we should speak more guardedly about 
amassing fortunes, for, over here, as well as in America, 
fortunes are melting fast. In journeying along this 
great north and south waterway of the antipodes, we 
have not permitted our interest in sights strange and 
picturesque to blind our eyes to the fact that this part 
of the world is suffering from the same blight which has 
brought business almost to a standstill everywhere else. 
Rubber, sugar, copra and tin are the principal products 
of the region, and all of them are today going begging in 
the markets of the world. Probably no city on the globe 
was more prosperous during the war than Singapore, 
yet no other has today a larger number of *'poor rich" 
men in proportion to its total population. * 'Frozen 
assets" seem to be playing even greater havoc in the 
trade centers of the East than in America or Europe, for 

50 



The Crossroads of the Eastern Seas 



here liquidation has been staved off much longer. Every 
one who had anything to sell on a big scale apparently 
sat tight in the confident belief that prices would event- 
ually right themselves, with the result that warehouses, 
or "godowns" as they are called in the Orient, are 
everywhere choked with unsold and unsalable com- 
modities and whole fleets of freighters are begging for 
cargoes that are not to be had. 

Surely the Kaiser made a world-wide job of it when 
he spilled the beans! 



51 



' BEWITCHING BURMA 

January 1922 

ANY well balanced Oriental itinerary should allow 
the tourist at least a week in the fascinating 
country which lies along the northeastern shore 
of the Bay of Bengal. It is a land where golden days, 
silvery nights, the music of tinkling pagoda bells and the 
laughter of a light-hearted people offer a lure well 
nigh irresistible. This at least is our impression in Jan- 
uary. Six months later, at the height of the monsoon 
season when the whole country is a scalding vapor bath, 
we would probably be less enthusiastic about it. 

Since 1885, Burma has been a province of British 
India, but aside from the artificial political ties which 
bind them there is little in common between the two 
countries. In features, dress, habits, temperament and 
religion there is as much difference between their peoples 
as between Japanese and Chinese. The rather flat, 
broad faces of the Burmese, attesting Mongol rather 
than Aryan descent, their jovial, care-free dispositions 
and their fondness for gay apparel, present a striking 
contrast to the sharp features, melancholy mien and 
drab attire of the natives of India proper. 

In Burma, religion is a recreation, while in India 
it is a grinding industry. The Hindu and Mohammedan 
faiths which between them have India by the throat 
have made no perceptible headway in Burma, where 
86 per cent of the people are Buddhists and where, in 
consequence, the terrible caste system of the Hindus 
and the no less terrible Moslem practice of secluding 

52 



Bewitching Burma 



women are practically unknown. Buddhism, as we 
first encountered it in Japan, impressed us as a rather 
gloomy and forbidding faith, but inBurma we have been 
struck by the cheery matter-of-factness with which it 
is accepted by its followers. Here, every important 
temple is a sort of neighborhood center where, after 
a hurried observance of their ritualistic duties, the 
worshippers linger to trade, swap talk and amuse 
themselves in all sorts of childish ways. 

The approaches to the larger temples of Rangoon 
and Mandalay, mostly of the pagoda type, are lined 
with stalls and booths where one can buy gold leaf, 
flowers, candles, gongs, drums and various other kinds 
of devotional paraphernalia, also pretty much everything 
to be found in the city bazaars. And once inside the 
sacred precincts, the ear is greeted with a babel of voices, 
and the eye with a scene of slap-dash activity, far more 
in keeping with a street carnival than with a house of 
worship. Here squat groups of chattering women who 
have brought their knitting, a supply of enormous 
cheroots and a morsel of lunch for a day of delightful 
gossip, their ears, noses, hands and feet glittering with 
gaudy trinkets. Here romp their numerous and 
mostly naked progeny, happier even than their 
mothers at having escaped from sun-baked 
homes for a few hours respite in the cool spaces 
of the big temple. Here too insistent merchants 
of both sexes hawk their nondescript wares, the 
din of their shrill voices frequently interrupted by the 
clang of the altar gong warning everyone to save a few 
coppers for the purchase of a priestly blessing. 

53 



Bewitching Burma 



Priesthood is Burma's most conspicuous institution. 
Every male Buddhist in the country is expected to spend 
some definite portion of his life, even if only a few weeks, 
in monastic study and work ; and since many discharge 
this obligation at an astonishingly early age it is no 
uncommon thing to see mere boys of 14 or 15 in the garb 
of a monk. The shaven heads, long yellow robes and 
bare brown feet of the monks of Burma will always 
remain one of our most vivid memories of this bewitching 
country. Seemingly a third of the male population, 
old, middle-aged and young, is thus attired, its chief 
occupation apparently being to wander from house to 
house, armed with the same sort of beggar's bowl that 
Kim's beloved lama carried in the Kipling story. 

This alms-gathering system of the Buddhist church 
in Burma is assuredly an air-tight, 100 per cent perfect 
one. Usually the expected toll is immediately forth- 
coming, but if it isn't the priestly beggar takes up his 
position directly before the door of the slacker's home, 
and there he stands, hours at a time if need be, motion- 
less as a statue, bowl extended, silently but eloquently 
advertising the penurious household to every passer-by. 
It is a species of picketing calculated to make the tightest 
of churchly tight-wads dig up. 

The pagodas of Burma, unlike the angular, many- 
storied ones common to China and Japan, are bell-like 
in form, a sort of elongated bell whose height is altogether 
out of proportion to its breadth. Each one is surmount- 
ed by a small umbrella-shaped spire called a ti, from 
whose encircling rings are suspended clusters of tiny 
bells so delicately adjusted that the slightest breeze 

54 



Bewitching Burma 



starts their tinkling melodies. In these musical high- 
pitched pagoda bells we seemed to detect another of the 
blithesome notes which Buddhism sounds in Burma — 
a note quite different from the doleful one it sounds in 
Japan, the massive bells of whose temples, when struck 
on the outer rim by the swing of a ponderous wooden 
beam, boom forth a deep knell which reverberates like 
distant thunder. 

All Burma is bespattered with pagodas, for he who 
causes the erection of one is regarded as a saint while 
upon earth and as certain of eternal happiness in the 
hereafter. You run on to them everywhere in the cities 
and towns, while their graceful and beautifully embel- 
lished forms are to be seen in the most unexpected places 
throughout the country districts, many being perched 
on the tops of almost inaccessible mountains. The 
greatest of them all is the famed Swe Dagon at 
Rangoon, which for six centuries, a portion of it for 
more than twenty centuries, has soared into the blue 
from an artificial terrace 166 feet high in the 
outskirts of that city. The structure itself is 370 
feet high, with a circumference at the base of 1355 
feet, and its entire surface, every inch of it from 
top to bottom, is covered with pure gold leaf! The 
multitude of tiny bells which dangle from its ti are of 
jewelled gold and silver, and its ultra-polygonal, almost 
circular, walls are supposed to guard some of the actual 
relics not only of the great Gautama, but also of the 
three other Buddhas who, long before the Christian era, 
preceded him. From whatever direction one approaches 
Rangoon, whether by river or by sea, this dazzling land- 

55 



Bewitching Burma 



mark can be seen many miles away, piercing the sky like 
a flaming torch. Clustered about its base, crowding 
the utmost limits of the great masonry terrace on which 
it stands, are hundreds of lesser pagodas, shrines 
and altars, each a mass of fantastic carvings and bril- 
liant color and each containing the stereotyped image 
of Buddha in marble, alabaster, bronze, sun-dried clay 
or wood — some sitting, some standing, others reclining. 
In Burma even the features of Charlie Chaplin are no 
better known than those of Buddha. 

For the unbeliever, a close inspection of this 
amazing conglomeration of sanctuaries is no easy matter 
because to gain access to the lofty terrace on which they 
elbow each other he (.and she as well) must remove both 
shoes and stockings and toil barefooted up seemingly 
endless flights of worn, filth-covered flagstone steps. In 
Japan we had become accustomed to exchanging shoes 
for sandals when visiting the holy places of Buddhism, 
but in Burma we quickly discovered that the hosiery 
must go also. The experience brought back happy 
boyhood memories, and they tell us that if we do much 
exploring of Hindu temples over in India proper we will 
have even greater occasion to recall those care-free days 
when stone bruises rather than corns were youth's 
common affliction. 

Despite its Swe Dagon and other strange oriental 
sights, Rangoon has a strong flavor of modern commer- 
cialism, for it is an important seaport town and the 
English have established many thri\'ing industries there. 
To get a glimpse of the real Burma we therefore motored 
up to Pegu, saw the thousand-year-old rechning figure of 

56 



Bewitching Burma 



Buddha — a granite statue 181 feet long, 46 feet high 
at the shoulder — which is the chief attraction of that 
place, and then went on by train to Mandalay, the cap- 
ital of the old Burmese kings, 300 miles further north. 

Although this quaint city, so widely famed by 
Kipling's pen, has a population of 138,000, unfortunately 
it possesses no hotel, at least none fit for Europeans or 
Americans. This circumstance compelled us to accept 
the hospitality of the local *'Dak Bungalow," as govern- 
ment rest houses are called thoughout the British East 
Indies. There, however, by supplying our own bedding 
and giving the steward in charge a liberal tip for cooking 
our food, we managed to get along quite comfortably 
for two nights. 

In the course of our recent zig-zagging some evilly 
disposed person (or perhaps he was only ignorant) came 
near cheating us out of a visit to Mandalay altogether 
by hinting that it offered nothing of sufficient interest 
to compensate for the hot, dusty and generally dis- 
agreeable railway journey from Rangoon. But as 
matters turned out, we heartily wished that the single 
day we did have there might have been at least three, 
for on the strength of even that shamefully brief visit we 
pronounced it the most interesting Oriental city we had 
yet seen save Peking ; and Peking, like Rome, is beyond 
the pale of comparisons. 

To do justice to Mandalay one should write a volume 
about it, but perhaps you can get some hazy idea of the 
place by coming with us on an imaginary climb up one 
of the almost interminable flights of stone steps that lead 

57 



Bewitching Burma 



to the templed summit of Mandalay Hill, an isolated 
mound several hundred feet high which rises abruptly from 
the northern edge of the city. From this eminence you will 
see a wonderful system of artificial lakes and canals 
interlacinga veritable forest of pagodas, and in the center 
of the picture, an immense square, each of whose sides 
is 134 miles long, bounded by a red brick wall 26 feet 
high, which in turn is surrounded by a moat 220 feet 
wide, — a moat still brimful of real water, quite unlike 
most moats you see in the East. This great square con- 
tains the palace, or rather litter of palaces, once occupied 
by the despotic kings of Burma and their numerous 
wives, concubines and retainers. Some of these palaces 
stand to-day in all the gaudy beauty that was theirs when 
the last dynasty fell, but mostly they have been converted 
to modern and more practical uses by the British 
conqueror. 

We must not leave Mandalay without at least a 
look at two of its most remarkable sights. The first 
is known as "The 730 Pagodas" — an immense walled 
enclosure in which stands a wilderness of small 
stone structures of the pagoda type. Their exact num- 
ber is 729 and they are uniformly about 20 feet high, 
all elaborately carved and each sheltering an upright 
marble slab on which is engraved a chapter from the holy 
books of Buddhism. 

The second of the most extraordinary sights is the 
great Arakan pagoda, whose approaches are guarded 
by a battalion of enormous, misshapen, stone figures, 
the function of which is to scare away evil spirits. 
* 'Devil-chasers," these grotesque images are called; 

58 



Bewitching Burma 



and if hideous grins, bulging eyes and belligerent 
attitudes count for anything they ought to be 
highly efficient at the job. In the holy shrine of this 
pagoda sits a gigantic image of Buddha. On its head, 
shoulders and breast dozens of half -naked worshippers can 
at any time be seen "acquiring merit" as they diligently 
apply to those portions of the great figure their hard 
earned contributions of pure gold leaf. At the rate the 
Buddha's golden proportions were expanding under this 
treatment the day we were there it struck us that sooner 
or later they must inevitably burst their rather cramped 
confines. Presumably, however, the monkish custodians 
of the place are too thrifty to let an undue accumulation 
of marketable gold leaf invite so dire a calamity. 

No one can view the innumerable pagodas, temples, 
shrines and monasteries in and about Mandalay without 
feeling that in the early days of the city the erection of 
such structures must have been the sole occupation of 
its inhabitants. And we are told (lack of time forbade 
our detouring to it) that the ancient capital of Burma, 
a place called Pagan, was once even more crowded 
with religious buildings. That city, whose ruins can 
still be traced over a region 20 miles long by 5 miles 
broad, is credited with having possessed 13,000 pagodas, 
and it is said that even today the remnants of no less 
than 5,000 can be counted there. 

Beneath his veneer of Buddhism the Burman, 
particularly of the rural districts, is a devout nature- 
worshipper. However casual or matter-of-fact may 
be his public performance of temple rites, he is 
constantly bowing down in private to his nats, 

59 



Bewitching Burma 



the spirits of the air, the sea, the land, mountains, 
streams and practically everything else with which his 
physical senses have made him acquainted. To these 
nats he erects his household shrines, and to them he 
continually goes before undertaking the smallest ven- 
tures. In his eyes even an inanimate hand tool has a 
conscious spirit which must be propitiated. The 
unaccountable thing about it all is that a people so 
intensely superstitious should at the same time be so 
gay, light-hearted and pleasure loving. 

This leads us to speak of a form of Burmese 
entertainment, which so far as we can learn, is character- 
istic of no other people. It is known as the pwe. When 
a Burman has unusual cause for rejoicing, such as the 
birth of a boy, the marriage of a daughter, recovery 
from illness, a good crop or a bit of lucky trading, 
he gives a pwe, which is a sort of carnival staged at his 
home, or more likely in the street in front of his home. 
It lasts all night, frequently several nights in succession, 
and to it everyone in the neighborhood is expected to 
come without being invited, the host providing refresh- 
ments, musicians, dancers and acrobats for the free 
entertainment of his guests. As someone is always 
giving a pwe and as everyone is always going to one, the 
nights of Burma are a continual round of jollification. 

In our ignorance we had conceived the idea that 
this out-of-the-way corner of the world was almost as 
thickly populated with elephants as with people. In 
the jungles which cover the northern regions of Burma 
such, perhaps, is the case; but in the populous delta 
sections of the south where, thanks to the life-giving 

60 



Beivitching Burma 



deposits of the great Irrawaddy River, the land is under 
high cultivation, there are fewer elephants than on 
any American "Main Street" on circus day. The only 
ones we saw were in the teak yards at Rangoon, 
where we found a mud-covered herd of the huge 
beasts busily engaged in hauling and piling logs. It 
was a novel sight, and we marvelled at the industry 
of the four-footed lumberjacks as they patiently bent 
to their task. Later, when their shouting mahouts 
suddenly ordered them to forget the logs and line up in 
front of our cameras, our interest waned a bit. The 
alacrity with which the big fellows obeyed the command, 
the evident effort they made to "look pretty" and the 
appealing way in which they afterward waved their 
trunks for baksheesh betrayed long practice at the 
begging game. Some day, before this trip is over, we 
hope to meet up with an elephant, at a safe distance of 
course, who has not been unduly commercialized. 

We were fortunate in witnessing the farewell appear- 
ance of the Prince of Wales in Burma as he sailed from 
Rangoon for Madras. It was a glorious day, and 
apparently all of the country's 12,000,000 people were 
at the jetty to see His Highness off. The Gandhi 
Non-cooperative movement having as yet made but 
little headway in Burma, no "hartal" had been declared 
there against the Prince, and consequently the streets 
were packed and the housetops were black with en- 
thusiastic natives, many of them wild tribesmen in 
primitive garb from the northern borders of the land. 
When the slim, white-clad youth mounted the "Duffer- 
ins" bridge and began waving his sun helmet in final adieus 



61 



Bewitching Burma 



to the throng, a British secret service man turned to 
us and exclaimed, '"E's a plucky little beggar, 'e is, for 
'e knows blarsted well they're layin' for 'im in Madras!" 



62 



INDIA— THE INDESCRIBABLE 

February 1922 

THE grandest sight in India is, of course, the 
Himalayas, and the most accessible point from 
which to view their highest peaks, Everest, Kin- 
chinjanga and the rest, is the beautiful hill station 
resort of Darjeeling, some 300 miles north of Calcutta. 
To reach there you leave the latter city in the evening 
on a broad-gauge road, transfer late at night to a metro- 
gauge, and early the following morning begin climbing 
the foothills of the "Roof of the World" on a track 
24 inches wide and behind a toy-like locomotive which 
sputters its protest at every stop. In a brief six hours 
it lifts you out of the fetid vapors of a tropical jungle 
into the bracing ozone of a northern clime, and on the 
way up makes you acquainted with as many varieties 
of vegetation as you would see on an overland trip from 
the Panama Canal to Hudson Bay. 

And at the journey's end, what a spectacle, provided 
the sky is clear. When Stoddard saw it 30 years ago he 
exclaimed, "Merciful God! is this a revelation of the gates 
of pearl, the gleaming battlements of the Celestial City?" — 
a sentiment which the most blase traveler of today can 
hardly fail to echo. 

Imagine a gigantic procession of snow-capped moun- 
tains stretching east and west as far as the eye can reach, 
scarcely one of which is less than twice the height of 
Pike's Peak. Observe that although the summits of some 
of these colossi are more than 100 miles from where you 
stand, itself a spot 7,000 feet above sea level, and although 

63 



India — The Indescribable 



the nearest of them is more than 40 miles distant, you 
must nevertheless look up, not off or away, in order to 
see them. No words can convey even a feeble idea of 
the grandeur of these massive ramparts, nor yet of the 
wonderfully picturesque scene that intervenes at your 
very feet. Darjeeling stands high on a jutting ledge, 
on a sort of mountain balcony, and thus affords the eye 
a double feast, — upward to the glistening spurs of the 
world's highest pinnacles and downward, sheer thousands 
of feet down, into the depths of fertile valleys whose 
sides and floors are beautifully upholstered with the 
trim bushes of great tea plantations. 

Yet sublime scenery is not the only attraction 
which draws the tourist to Darjeeling. Situated on the 
threshold of forbidden Tibet and flanked on either side 
by mountainous states whose people have as yet been 
but little influenced by modern civilization, the town, 
particularly on market days, is overrun with 
fierce looking natives as little resembling the 
races of central and southern India as a Scotch High- 
lander resembles a Sicilian. Most of them are tall, 
rawboned folk of a decidedly Mongolian cast of counte- 
nance. The men sport pigtails and cutlasses, and the 
women adorn themselves with a vast amount of cumber- 
some jewelry, their nose hoops and pendants and their 
elaborately wrought earrings being especially ponderous. 
It is among these people, by the way, that the pleasant 
custom obtains of permitting several men, often brothers, 
to marry the same woman ! The prevailing religion is a 
debased form of Buddhism, characterized chiefly by a 
prodigal use of the prayer wheel and prayer flag. The 

64 



India — The Indescribable 



former device, whirled rapidly by the muscular worship- 
per, has a powerfully deterrent effect on evil spirits. 
The latter consists of a tall bamboo pole, frequently many 
of them in a group, to which petitions written on rice 
paper are lightly attached. When these are wafted 
away by the first chance breeze they speedily reach the 
gods and of course are as speedily answered. 

To turn from the world's loftiest mountains on the 
northern borders of India to the peaks, less than a third 
as high, which dominate its plains a thousand miles to 
the southwest is to risk an anti-climax, yet the latter, 
the Aravalli Hills of Rajputana, are invested with a 
charm all their own by reason of their extraordin- 
ary rock formations. 

Mount Abu, the most celebrated of these peaks, is 
strewn with black boulders of enormous size and every 
conceivable shape. And near its summit reposes a lake of 
transcendent beauty, while not far away, in a grove of 
mango trees, above and apart from the treadmill of 
Hindustan's teeming life, one stumbles onto a suc- 
cession of temples the like of which is not to be found 
in all this great land of pagan sanctuaries. They are 
known as the Dilwarra temples and were built some 
seven centuries ago by the Jains, that strange sect, 
part Brahman, part Buddhist, to which nearly a million 
and a half of the inhabitants of India fanatically 
adhere. The priests in charge of these temples carry 
their scruples against the slaughter of animals, partic- 
ularly cattle, to such lengths that no visitor is granted 
admission until he has divested himself of shoes, pocket- 
book, belt and any other article of leather which he 

65 



India — The Indescribable 



may chance to have on his person. This trifling annoy- 
ance is quickly forgotten, however, when one finally comes 
face to face with the entrancing sight within. 

Here again words are futile. We shall not attempt 
to put into language a description of the incomparable 
carvings which have so long been the despair of the 
world's leading sculptors, artists, architects and writers. 
If you can picture in your mind's eye a labyrinth 
of white marble domes, archways, colonnades and 
pillars all covered with a magic frostwork of exquisitely 
chiseled images — gods, satyrs, devils, men and 
beasts — , each of which is a real museum piece, you 
may, perhaps, get some faint conception of the bewildering 
beauty of the scene. 

Amazement that such sculptured wizardry existed 
centuries before America was discovered is equalled 
only by astonishment that buildings so huge and so 
marvelously embellished should have been tucked away 
in the recesses of a remote mountain. Yet when we 
are reminded that this is the traditional spot once 
inhabited by the gods it seems quite fitting that it should 
have been dedicated to their worship in this splendid 
fashion, and we can only hope that they have duly 
rewarded the souls of those who here "designed like 
Titans and wrought like jewelers" in their honor. 

Then the Taj Mahal at Agra! Just as the Dilwarra 
temples are the finest examples of profusion and deUcacy 
in carved marble figures in all India, so the Taj stands 
supreme in all the world in the extent and richness of its 
inlay work and in the symmetry of its architectural 
lines. And while the Dilwarra exteriors, fine though 



66 



India — The Indescribable 



they are, give but little hint of the wonders within, the 
exterior of the great tomb at Agra, with its perfectly 
balanced proportions and its magnificent setting— in a 
formal garden traversed by cypress bordered avenues 
through which course streams of sparkling water — is but 
a prelude to its superb interior. 

Having no more adjectives at hand we can only 
take refuge in the simple statement that thousands of 
vastly more competent judges than we have pronounced 
the Taj the most beautiful symphony in stone ever 
conceived by man; "frozen music" some one has called it. 
Truly, it would be little less than profanation for a lay- 
man to try to describe how the walls of this great mau- 
soleum, both inside and out, are literally frescoed with 
costly stones of every imaginable hue, or to endeavor to 
to picture the subdued twilight effect produced beneath 
its vaulted dome by the lace-like trellis work of its great 
marble screens. It all must be seen, and when seen one 
becomes speechless, just as at the Grand Canyon of the 
Colorado, or when watching a sunrise unveiling of the 
Himalayas from Tiger Hill back of Darjeeling. 

The Taj Mahal was built in the early part of the 17th 
century by the last of India's great trio of Mogul Em- 
perors, Shah Jehan. He built it to house the remains of 
his favorite wife, who died while bearing their fourteenth 
child. Both her body and his repose in its crypt. Up- 
wards of 10,000 workmen were engaged for twenty-two 
years in its construction. The edifice, which is 186 feet 
square, with walls 108 feet high supporting a central dome 
and pinnacle 217 feet high, stands on a great marble base, 
itself 22 feet in height and nearly two acres in extent. 

67 



India — The Indescribable 



Not the least marvelous thing about the whole wond- 
rous structure is its seeming youthfulness. Although 
completed more than a century before the signing of the 
Declaration of Independence, it still looks like a work 
of yesterday. 

When Shah Jehan commanded his architects to 
dream this marble dream he little thought that he him- 
self would never be permitted to inspect their finished 
task, yet this was the cruel trick which Fate played him. 
During the last seven years of the work an unfilial son, 
who had usurped his throne, kept him closely confined 
in the Jasmine* Tower of the old fort across the river. 
Before saying good-bye to Agra we climbed this tower 
to his prison cell, and gazing through its now shattered 
windows at the beautiful Taj, two miles away, tried to 
picture the emotions of the old Emperor as, year after 
year, he watched its stately walls rise in the distance, 
knowing fuU well that he could never behold the glories 
within them. 

Even had Agra no Taj Mahal, it still should be a 
Mecca for lovers of the beautiful. Long the seat of 
Mogul power, the city and its environs for miles around 
abound in monumental relics of that golden age of 
Indian architecture, relics which would be counted 
world wonders anywhere else but which here are com- 
pletely eclipsed by the Great Masterpiece. Most tour- 
ists, after repeated visits to the Taj to make certain 
that none of its sunlight, twilight or moonlight moods 
have escaped them, are apt to make short work of the 
lesser sights. They take a look at the chastely beauti- 
ful Pearl Mosque, said to be the finest because the most 

68 



India — The Indescribable 



symetrically proportioned Moslem sanctuary in the 
world; drive out to the tomb of Itimad-ud-daula, a 
smaller but in some respects more exquisite example of 
flowery architecture than the Taj itself; and perhaps 
continue five miles further on to pay a hurried visit to 
the massive tomb of Akbar, the greatest Mogul of them 
all — then rush to catch their train. In so doing, they 
not only neglect much of extraordinary interest in Agra 
and its immediate vicinity but they also miss one of the 
most impressive and, to our notion, one of the most 
unique of all the strange sights of India — the deserted city 
of Fatehspur Sikra, 23 miles away, a place which we 
must confess never having heard of until a few weeks ago. 

Here the great emperor, Akbar, when at the height of 
his power and fame, built a capital and for several years 
maintained a court which were the envy of every royal 
rival, Asiatic and European alike, of the glittering age 
in which he lived. Then, of a sudden, he abandoned it all. 
Just why, accounts differ, but an insufficient water supply 
seems to be the most commonly accepted theory. At 
any rate the place was evacuated almost over night and 
its inhabitants and all their movable belongings packed 
off to Agra. This happened some three hundred years 
ago, yet of such enduring materials and with such pains- 
taking care were the buildings constructed that today, 
given a bit of house cleaning, they remain as habit- 
able as ever. 

Fatehspur Sikri is a sort of latter-day Pompeii, with 
the difference that here no excavations are needed to 
show precisely how things looked originally. Nothing is 
buried, nothing is in ruins. After reading the story of 

69 



India — The Indescribable 



Akbar and his remarkable reign, and then standing on 
the summit of the great Gate of Victory, the highest 
portal of which any walled city in India can boast, it is 
less difficult than might be supposed to imagine these 
deserted streets repeopled with gay throngs in their vivid 
oriental colorings; to reconstruct a picture of the richly 
caparisoned elephants, camels and horses which once 
trod the now silent pavements; to believe that the walls 
and floors of the well preserved buildings stretching 
away in the distance are still covered with priceless 
tapestries and rugs, and that perfumed water still splashes 
in the marble fountains of their courts. On the whole, 
one gets a tremendous "kick" out of this embalmed city, 
something like that which one gets from the 4,000-year- 
old mummy of an Egyptian Pharaoh. 

Akbar was not only a mighty conqueror, but he was 
alsoa just and practical ruler, a lawgiver scarcely second 
to Moses and a theological student of such broad and 
tolerant views that he had a specially arranged audience 
chamber constructed for the purpose of enabling Moslems 
Hindus, Jews, Christians and other sects to debate the 
merits of their respective creeds in his presence. That 
he took a lively interest in these debates is evidenced by 
the great moral code which he himself eventually laid 
down for the guidance of his subjects and which was a 
sort of symposium of the loftiest thought of all religions. 
He was undoubtedly one of the world's truly great men, 
yet how few of us know anything about him or his once 
magnificent capital! At the time of our visit we were 
the second party of Americans who had been there in 
six months. 



70 



India — The Indescribable 



If the traveler in India has a liking for bona fide 
ruins, and is not particular about their antiquity, he 
should go to Lucknow and take a look at the mutilated 
but impressively beautiful remains of its mourned British 
"Residency." Here, during the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, a 
small English garrison was besieged for three months, 
during which time no less than 2,000 men, women and 
children perished miserably within the enclosure. Its 
crumbling, shot-torn walls stood proudly erect within 
the memory of many still living, yet to-day they look 
like 10th century ruins. They are remarkably picture- 
sque, nevertheless, for the English, to whom this one- 
time charnal house is a shrine, have covered it with a 
mantle of vines and surrounded it with lovely flower 
gardens in a setting of well kept lawns, all combining 
to make a picture that looks like a bit of old England. 

In going west to Delhi by way of Lucknow one should 
not fail to stop off a few hours at Cawnpore and visit 
another spot which the English hold sacred and which 
they have likewise transformed into a beautiful home- 
land park. Here, also during the Sepoy mutiny, and 
on a spot which was then the center of a parched plain, 
230 gallant soldiers, encumbered by 700 women and 
children, were exposed for nearly three weeks to the 
fire of more than 3,000 well armed and well trained 
native troops. It was midsummer and the temp- 
erature ranged from 120o to 140oF. The rebels were 
sheltered from the British fire, and from the scarcely 
less deadly fire of the sun, by the walls and roofs of 
distant buildings, but the defenders and their helpless 
womenfolk and children lay out in the open, exposed 

71 



India — The Indescribable 



both to gunfire and to the terrible heat. When, finally, 
news reached the insurgents that English reinforcements 
were coming, an armistice was granted and the handful 
of survivors was escorted to the banks of the Ganges 
under promise of safe conduct down stream. But just 
as they were boarding their boat the remnants of the 
Httle garrison were fired upon without warning by the 
treacherous commander of the mutinous troops and 
practically all of them, both officers and men, were 
annihilated. Some 200 women and children were spared, 
only to be brought back to Cawnpore and lodged 
in a house containing but two rooms, each 20 feet by 
10 feet in size, where during the week that ensued before 
succor arrived, twenty -eight of them died. 

With the rumblings of rebellion today again sound- 
ing throughout the land, is it any wonder that English 
women all over India turn pale with apprehension 
when they reflect on the tragic happenings of 1857? 



72 



DELHI— INDIANS NEW-OLD CAPITAL 

February 1922 

PERHAPS nowhere else in the world can one witness 
such a strange mixture of yesterday, to-day and 
tomorrow as at Delhi. As far back as its history 
is written, this ancient capital has been a shining 
target for India's invaders, and all of them seem to have 
had an itch for building a new and more imposing 
city of their own in the near vicinity of the one captured. 
Wherefore, the plains round about the Delhi of today are 
littered with the ruined palaces, forts, temples and tombs 
of half a dozen Delhis of the past. And as if there 
were something compelling about the age-old habit, 
India's latest conqueror. Great Britain, is now creating 
still another Delhi, one which bids fair to outshine in 
size and magnificence, certainly in sanitation, all its 
historic predecessors. 

Since 1911, when George V. of England well nigh broke 
Calcutta's heart by announcing that Delhi was again 
to become the capital of India, the ponderous machinery 
which controls the governmental affairs of the country 
has been housed in temporary buildings scattered all 
over the latter city. But ere long, perhaps less than 
five years hence, these will be abandoned for the perma- 
nent structures of stone whose massive forms are already 
taking shape only a few miles away. 

We predict that one institution of present day 
Delhi will continue to do business indefinitely at the 
old stand. This is the celebrated Jami Masjid, beneath 
whose towering minarets most of the native population 

73 



Delhi — India's New-Old Capital 



of this predominantly Mohammedan city have for 
centuries worshipped and where it will doubtless con- 
tinue to worship, no matter at what personal in- 
convenience. 

The Jami Masjid is the largest mosque in the Orient, 
and any Friday morning a most remarkable sight may 
be seen within its walls. On that Moslem Sabbath day 
devout worshippers by the tens of thousands crowd 
its great rectangle, a granite paved court 325 feet 
square, and with eyes toward Mecca, their white- 
robed figures rising and falling in rhythmic undulations, 
offer praise to Allah and his prophet. 

Whatever may be thought of the tenets of Islam, 
no one can witness such a scene without feeling that its 
forms of worship have an intensely spiritual background. 
It is at least a religion which requires no such sup- 
erstitious and disgusting props as those with which 
the Hindu and Buddhist faiths are bolstered up, — 
no sacred cattle, monkeys, turtles or snakes, no grease- 
smeared altars, no foul bathing-pools, no litter of "graven 
images" and no temple traffic in cheap merchandise. 

Nevertheless the Moslem is by no means wholly 
devoid of superstition, and he does love to do a little 
thrifty trading "under the eaves," if not within the 
portals, of his sanctuary. At this same Jami Masjid, the 
high priest will show you several carefully treasured hairs 
from the beard of Mohammed, if you are credulous 
enough to pay five rupees for the privilege of seeing 
them, while regularly every afternoon the entire Mos- 
lem population of the city, it would seem from appear- 

74 



Delhi — India's New-Old Capital 



ances, encamps on the great flights of steps leading up 
to the mosque and there offers for sale those innumerable 
things which make the bazaars of India so irresistible 
both to native and to foreign shoppers. 

Another landmark of the existing Delhi which will 
assuredly survive the exodus to the future city is the 
famous old fort on the banks of the Jumna, that historic 
stream once robust enough to float vessels of considerable 
size, but now reduced to a mere rivulet through the 
embezzlement of its waters by a network of irrigating 
canals. Volumes have been written about this hoary 
fortress, but most tourists will carry away from it only 
one indelible picture — the picture of the public and private 
audience chambers in the splendid old palace which its 
ramparts protect. This palace was the work of the Shah 
Jehan of Taj Mahal fame, and it was there, in the private 
audience chamber, that the dazzling peacock throne stood 
until a Persian conqueror ruthlessly carted it off to 
Teheran. While the absence of this magnificent piece of 
golden furniture, with its embroidery of diamonds, 
sapphires, emeralds and rubies, gives the spacious hall a 
somewhat empty look, its splendid proportions and the 
great quantity of precious stones with which its walls are 
inlaid renders it still worthy of the ancient inscription 
engraved over its entrance — "If there be Paradise on 
earth, it is here, it is here." 

Yet there are paradises and paradises, and as we 
came out from this particular one the other morning, and 
saw the sky over the Jumna bottoms fairly black with 
ducks and geese — not the tame varieties with which every 

75 



Delhi — Indians New-Old Capital 



moist spot in India abounds, but the honest-to-goodness 
sort that would quicken the pulse of any Heron Lake or 
Long Meadow hunter in Minnesota — it struck us that to 
sit in a shooting-blind in the great outdoors watching 
for a chance to stop one of those speed law violators of the 
air would be a far more delightful occupation than to 
squat on a gem-upholstered throne of gold, dealing out 
life and death, mostly death, to human beings. But 
tastes differ and times change. 

While at Delhi we attended a session of the National 
Legislative Assembly and were much impressed with the 
resemblance between its procedure and that of the Eng- 
lish House of Commons. There were the same searching 
questions to cabinet members by members of the 
opposition; the same informing, sometimes adroitly 
uninforming, replies; the same scholarly debates; the 
same terse and decisive rulings from the suave speaker in 
his wig and gown. Both the Hindu turban and the 
Mohammedan fez were in evidence all over the chamber. 
Their dark-skinned wearers have an actual voting 
majority in the body, yet so fluently do most of them 
speak English that you can sit in the gallery, with 
closed eyes, and scarcely realize that you are not listen- 
ing to the proceedings of a strictly Anglo-Saxon parlia- 
ment. 

The National Assembly is the supreme lawmaking 
power in India and its enactments directly affect, for 
better or worse, a greater number of people than those of 
any other legislative body on earth. Fifty years ago 
such an institution would have been unthinkable. A 
decade ago, the most liberal of British statesmen would 

76 



Delhi — Indians New-Old Capital 



have declared it highly impracticable, yet to-day the 
Viceroy, with all the power that has been delegated him 
by the English government, rarely vetoes any of its 
measures. To an outside observer, it would seem that 
through the functioning of this body India already has 
a very substantial measure of home rule. But the 
Gandhites call it all a farce and demand an entirely 
new deal, one under which not even an English minority 
will have a voice. "India for the Indians!" is their cry. 

Right here, let us clear up a misapprehension under 
which we, probably in common with a good many others, 
have heretofore labored regarding British rule in India. 
While we had always known of the Native States, we 
had no idea of their extent nor of the very considerable 
authority exercised by their rulers. Less than two-thirds 
of the country is under actual British administration. 
Out of its total area of 1,773,000 square miles, 675,000 
square miles belong to independent, or semi-independent, 
states where more than 70,000,000 of the country's 
319,000,000 people are governed by native princes, 
variously styled Maharajahs, Maharanas, Nawabs, 
Nizams, Gaekwars etc. There are several hundred of 
these principalities, and they range in size from mere 
holdings of less than 20 square miles up to a domain like 
Hyderabad, as large as Italy, with a population of more 
than 13,000,000. Some of them issue their own cur- 
rency and postage stamps, operate railways of their 
own and in purely internal matters have full sovereign 
authority. In several instances the native ruler even 
exercises the power of life and death over his subjects. 

All that the foster mother, Great Britain, demands 
77 



Delhi — India's New-Old Capital 



is that local affairs within the Native States shall be ad- 
ministered along substantially the same enlightened 
lines which she herself endeavors to pursue in her own 
provinces, such as Bengal, Bombay and Madras. She 
also demands that the native potentates shall not become 
embroiled in quarrels among themselves nor with any 
foreign power, nor do anything, in short, calculated to 
embarrass the administration of affairs in British India 
proper. 

In exchange for all this she pledges herself to respect 
the territorial integrity of the Native States and agrees 
also to protect them against the aggressions of others. 

On the whole, the arrangement seems to work very 
satisfactorily. Almost without exception the native 
princes are thoroughly loyal to the British crown, while 
their subjects seem far less disposed to listen to revo- 
lutionary talk than do those in the provinces which are 
directly under British rule. The Gandhi Non-co-oper- 
ative movement has apparently made but little headway 
in most of the Native States, possibly because their rulers 
have been more alert than the English provincial governors 
to see that it did not gain a foothold. 

Our four days stay at Delhi was enlivened by the 
feverish preparations then under way for the coming of 
the Prince of Wales the following week. The Non- 
co-operators had proclaimed a "hartaV (boycott) against 
all public functions in his honor, just as they had done 
practically everywhere else on his trip, To counteract 
this, the government, and the English colony of Delhi as 
a whole, were putting forth extraordinary efforts to stage 
a spectacle calculated to show the entire country how 

78 



Delhi — India's New-Old Capital 



loyal its capital was to the future King of Great Britain 
and Emperor of India. 

The city looked like an armed camp when we arrived, 
and fresh detachments of troops poured in by 
every train. For two hours each morning the streets 
over which the royal procession was to pass were closed 
to traffic while all branches of the service were 
put through a most exacting rehearsal of their 
part in the forthcoming pageant. To the martial 
strains of band music and the shrill wail of bagpipes, John 
Bull's handpicked fighting men from all over India 
streamed through the city, the brilliant uniforms and 
banners of the Sikh, Gurkha and other native regiments 
offering a picturesque contrast to the plaid kilts 
of the Highlanders and the toneless khaki of the Tommies. 

Poor little Prince! He certainly has been worked 
like a slave in India this winter. Ever since landing 
in Bombay last November, his daily program has varied 
only occasionally and in very slight degree from this: 
awakened in the private car of his royal train by the 
inevitable "God Save the King," played by an enthus- 
iastic local band; breakfasting with the reception 
committee; acknowledging the plaudits of the crowd, or at 
least of the English portion thereof, as his long proces- 
sion wends its way to the official residence of some 
provincial governor or to the palace of some native 
prince; listening to the reading of a tedious address of 
welcome and reading in turn an equally tedious response, 
whose author must carry with him a complete library of 
everything extant on Indian history, economics and 
politics; an "informal" six-course luncheon with local 

79 



Delhi — Indians Neiv-Old Capital 



celebrities; then a game of polo or a mount at the 
racetrack, followed by tea at an afternoon garden 
party. Finally, a formal ten -course dinner as a 
prelude to the usual grand ball and then, at midnight or 
later, back to the special train for a few hours sleep 
before being summoned by the national anthem for 
another day of like sort at the next stop. And he stops 
pretty much everywhere ! 

Yet the "Wonderful Little Beggar," as the English 
in India affectionately call him, has stood up under the 
ordeal month after month remarkably well; the "close-up" 
we had of him at Rangoon the day he sailed for Madras 
convinced us of that fact. Although he had just finished 
a particularly dizzy week in Burma, and although the 
elaborate farewell ceremonies had exposed him for hours 
to the punishing heat, the infectious smile which every- 
where wins him friends was still doing duty. His zest 
in the proceedings seemed boyishly unaffected. 

The prevalent opinion among the English with 
whom we have talked is that it was decidedly tactless 
for the government to send the heir apparent out here 
at a time when political conditions are so much awry, 
but however that may be, the Prince has certainly 
carried himself exceedingly well. Even though given 
the cold shoulder by most of the natives, he has appar- 
ently committed no indiscretion likely to widen the 
breach between them and the authorities. But how he 
must long to be a plain nobody for a few months, and 
what a terrible prospect for a very human chap in his 
twenties to look forward to, whether as prince or king, — 

80 



Delhi— India's New-Old Capital 



everlastingly in the limelight, eternally discharging the 
tiresome functions which nowadays are encumbent upon 
figurehead royalty! 



81 



SOME TYPICAL NATIVE STATES 

February 1922 

NO tour of India is complete without at least a 
look in on some of the Native States, hence we 
paid hurried visits to Jaipur, Udaipur and 
Baroda, which are fairly typical of most such principalities. 

Jaipur 

On reaching the capital of Jaipur, a city of the 
same name on the direct route from Delhi to Bombay, 
we realized that at last we were in the India of our 
dreams. For here were plenty of elephants, not the 
menial sort we had seen laboring belly -deep in the mire 
of Rangoon's teak yards, but clean, classy looking fellows, 
artistically tatooed and otherwise dolled up, who swung 
their ponderous hulks in the most matter-of-fact way 
through the city's congested streets. Here that "ship 
of the desert," the camel, was everj^ where in evidence, 
seemingly better fed, better groomed and even more 
supercilious than any of his tribe we had encountered 
before. Lumbering bullock carts piled high with pro- 
duce and wares of every description, droves of sheep 
and goats, and the usual contingent of sacred cows, 
accentuated the oriental scene. 

But the oddest sight of all, to our unaccustomed 
eyes, was the Jaipur beard. The face of the present 
Maharajah of the state is concealed behind a wirey 
bunch of whiskers, parted with precision in the middle 
and bristling stiffly out to right and left like the wings 
of an aeroplane. The royal fashion thus set has been 
faithfully followed by most of the male adults of the 

82 



Some Typical Native States 



population, who, however, have gone His Highness one 
better by dyeing their facial bird-nests a bright red! As 
nearly every third man one jostles against in Jaipur's 
crowded streets supplements his fiery beard with a brilliant 
uniform and shining side-arms, marking him either as 
a government official or an officer of the Rajah's toy army, 
our first impression of the place was that we had fallen 
amongst a people possessing an insatiable thirst for 
blood. We quickly discovered, however, that these fierce 
exteriors mask dispositions as mild as any to be found 
in the East. 

The city of Jaipur has a population of about 140,000, 
and being less than two centuries old is quite modern, 
as time is counted in the Orient. It is the only place 
in India which shows much evidence of real city planning, 
being laid out in rectangular blocks with thoroughfares 
more than 100 feet wide, most of them fairly well 
paved. It has a pretty little park, an interesting 
museum and a hospital manned by European physicians . 
But here all twentieth century symptoms cease, for 
there are neither sewers, water mains, trolley cars, 
telephones, electric lights nor even a solitary movie, 
while the automobiles, most of them graduates of the 
class of 1912, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. 
And punctually at nine o'clock each evening the 
massive city gates are closed and locked, just as in 
olden times when a night attack from some roving enemy 
had to be guarded against. 

The buildings of Jaipur are commonly four or five 
stories in height, and their rose-tinted stucco fronts 
frequently are adorned with huge pictures of fighting 

83 



Some Typical Native States 



elephants. We were told that all this fierce pictorial 
display relates to some early incident in the history of 
the city, but exactly what it was no one seemed to know. 

Being much more interested in the flesh and blood 
elephants of the Jaipur of today than in these crude 
mural paintings of their belligerent ancestors, we lost 
no time in visiting the royal stables of the Rajah where 
some splendid specimens of the beasts were seen, to- 
gether with a herd of disdainful looking camels and 
scores of pure-stock Arabian horses. Several of the 
latter were put through their paces for our entertain- 
ment. One of them, just to show how thoroughly 
house broken he was, was ridden up and down the 
steep stairs which ascend to the quarters of the head 
groom. 

On the second day of our stay at Jaipur, we climbed 
to the boat deck of one of the royal Jumbos for a trip 
up to Amber, the ancient capital of the state. It proved 
a tempestuous voyage and so tediously slow that we 
were glad to swap mounts at the end of the climb and 
make the return trip wedged in between the humps of 
a speedier though scarcely less bone-racking camel. An 
elephant or camel ride is the ambition of every tourist 
in India, but one such experience is usually enough. 

Amber dates back to the 10th century. Its ruins, 
now inhabited by a band of unusually large, long- 
tailed monkeys, cluster together in a defile of the moun- 
tains some seven miles from Jaipur. One gets a fine 
view of its crumbling walls from the 16th-century palace 
which clings to the side of the bluff midway between the 
old capital and the new. And looking back through the 



84 



Some Typical Native States 



alabaster latticed casements of that palace toward the 
modern city the eye sweeps a striking panorama — a 
pretty artificial lake at the foot of the cliff, a battle- 
mented wall, almost as impressive as the great wall of 
China, winding up and down for miles over the jungle- 
covered mountains, and beyond, the rose-hued buildings 
of Jaipur. In the still further distance, the bleak desert 
of Rajputana stretches away from the city, whose suburbs 
are already slowly submerging in its sands, to the dim, 
far-off horizon. 

On the return voyage from Amber, we came upon a 
couple of naked citizens perched on the top of a high mud 
wall, their black bodies making a picturesque silhouette 
against the gray background of the mountainside. It 
was not their nakedness, however, that attracted us, for of 
that we have had plenty the past few weeks, but rather 
the tremendous headgear they wore which resembled 
enormous turbans, and at a distance appeared to consist 
of the usual cheap fabric in which the Hindu delights 
to swath his head. Our guide informed us that in 
this case the material was hair, not cloth, — live, 
growing hair at that. Being skeptical on the point, 
we opened up negotiations with the more heavily en- 
dowed of the two gentlemen with a view to having his 
alleged tresses uncoiled and photographed, and after a 
lengthy parley over how much we should contribute to 
'*temple repairs" for the privilege (these being "holy 
men" of an ultra-holy sect) we finally succeeded in making 
one of the most interesting films of our entire collection. 
When developed it revealed the Apollo-like figure of a 
young though bearded Indian, clothed from head to 

85 



Some Typical Native States 



foot in nature's garb, his countenance of a decidedly- 
intellectual cast, and in his outstretched arms two eight- 
foot lengths of luxuriant, firmly rooted hair! It was a 
picture which brought vividly to mind the boyhood 
awe with which we used to gaze on the hirsute cascades 
of those celebrated Seven Sisters, as they posed in 
the window of their 14th Street establishment 
in old New York. 

The Maharajah of Jaipur rules over a territory one- 
quarter as large as Minnesota with a population 500,000 
greater than ours. He lives in a gaudy palace of sky- 
scraper height containing hundreds of rooms. It is 
surrounded by pretentiously designed but ill-kept grounds 
which occupy the center of the city and cover one-seventh 
of its area. He has reigned 39 years, is now partially 
paralyzed (the excuse given for not admitting tourists to 
his palace), and having no legitimate male descendant has 
recently adopted an heir. He is famed throughout India 
for his benevolence, — with money, of course, which his 
nearly 3,000,000 subjects contribute in taxes and rents 
to his coffers. 

Apart from the British political agent and his staff, 
who constitute the sole connecting link between the 
Maharajah and the government of India, there are almost 
no European residents in Jaipur. It is Asiatic to the 
core. 

Udaipur 

Even more primitive than Jaipur, and much less 
accessible, is Udaipur. On the way to the latter city our 
car was cut out of the "Bombay Mail" at Ajmer 
during the night and attached to a branch line 

86 



Some Typical Native States 



train which deposited us early the following morning 
at a little station called Chitorgahr. That name 
meant nothing to us, nor at first glance was there 
anything about the place to distinguish it from 
hundreds of other way stations which these roving 
Indian railways have endowed with water tank, turn 
table and refreshment room. But a second look sent 
us digging into our guide-books, for there, almost within 
hailing distance, a great Gibraltar-like rock rose abruptly 
out of the plain, its four-mile long crest buttressed from 
end to end by the gray walls of a once splendid citadel. 

These impressive ruins proved to be the remains of 
ancient Chitor, than which no spot in India is more 
replete with tragic memories. It was here, for example, 
that the virtuous wife of a Rajput prince fled 
to an underground fortress and after barricading its 
entrance deliberately cremated herself and more than 
a hundred of her faithful maid-servants and women 
of the court in order to escape the lustful Moham- 
medan invader who had vanquished her husband's army. 

A few days later, on our way back from Udaipur, 
we stopped to explore these historic heights, so rarely 
visited by tourists. Although the trip was a hard one, 
on the straw-covered bottom of a springless bullock 
cart and through suffocating clouds of dust, it proved 
well worth all the discomfort it cost. 

After a hasty breakfast at the little station beneath 
Chitor's frowning towers, we transferred to the narrow 
gauge road which the Maharana of Udaipur maintains, 
rather reluctantly we are told, between the outside 
world and his capital. The distance is only 69 miles. 



87 



Some Typical Native States 



but it took all forenoon to negotiate it, thanks to an 
asthmatic engine, a makeshift roadbed and an endless 
succession of mud villages, at each of which the train 
crew found it necessary to revive their waning energies. 
The country traversed proved the most uninteresting, 
even forbidding, we had yet seen in India. It was 
almost a desert with little to relieve its drear mono- 
tony save an occasional outcrop of snowy marble, as 
snowy as any from the quarries of Carrara. The 
nearer we got to Udaipur the less probable it seemed that 
amid such desolate surroundings we were likely to find "the 
most beautifully situated city in India." 

But at last, almost without warning, our indolent 
train turned its back on the barren plain, plunged into 
a mountain defile, and half an hour later we found our- 
selves gazing on a scene of indescribable loveliness from 
the veranda of Udaipur's one hotel. This bare, jail- 
like establishment, by courtesy called a hotel, is sub- 
sidized by the Maharana in order that the occasional, 
and none too welcome tourist, may not go entirely 
without food or lodging when visiting his domains. It 
is situated on an eminence nearly a mile from the city 
and for that circumstance we soon came to be devoutly 
thankful, Udaipur being one of those places to which 
distance lends enchantment; like a large oil painting, 
not to be examined too closely. 

At our feet, surrounded by a high bastioned wall, 
lay a veritable dream city, a city of creamy whiteness, 
from the center of which, and flanked by gardens of tropical 
green, towered the imposing, many-storied palace of the 
Maharana. Between the granite cupolas of this lofty 

88 



Some Typical Native States 



pile glimpses could be had of the charming lake on whose 
hither shore it stands, and of two marble-capped islands 
in the distance. Beyond and to either side, as a frame 
for the whole fairy picture, rose tier upon tier of 
billowy hills all covered with a green growth of jungle. 
Nowhere in our travels had we seen a more alluring 
combination of God's handiwork and man's, par- 
ticularly as it appeared a few hours later in the soft 
shades of approaching dusk. 

But when inspecting this ethereal city at short range 
the following day we received another and quite 
different impression of its charms, for we found it nec- 
essary to thread our way through narrow, crooked streets 
littered with ill-smelling refuse and lined with half- 
decayed buildings whose creaminess was oftener that of 
whitewash than marble, — streets thronged with wretched- 
ly clad, sad-visaged people, as forlorn looking as the 
scrawny cattle, goats, dogs and camels wit h which they 
mingled on fraternal terms. 

It was in the great palace itself that disillusionment 
became complete. Here we wandered through rooms 
without end and climbed stairs interminable only to 
meet everywhere tawdry magnificence, a hideous 
clash of colors, a riotous mess of ill-mated furniture and 
furnishings. Imagine a wooden rocker of the cheapest 
American make in close communion with a solid 
silver bedstead of exquisite oriental design, or a room 
whose blue tiled ceiling, red upholstered chairs and 
bright green table-spread contend noisily with a 
priceless rug of imperial yellow ! The present generation 
of Indian princes seem to have inherited none of the good 



Some Typical Native States 



taste of their beauty-loving ancestors. Their fabulous 
wealth and inordinate love of display only produce 
results calculated to drive an artistic house decorator 
to drink, and His Highness, Maharajad Hiraja Maharana 
Sir Fateh Singh Bahadur, G. C. S. C, G. C. I. E., G. 
C. V. O. (such is how the occupant of Udaipur's palatial 
abomination signs himself) is no exception to the rule. 

This particular 'Raja is rated in India's "Who's 
Who" as the bluest of blue-blooded princes, for his line 
extends back to the original Sun-stock of Oudh, beyond 
which Hindustan's aristocracy takes no account of fam- 
ily trees. At all great functions he claims precedence, 
as India's premier prince, over the representatives of 
all rival houses ; and odd stories are told of how he even 
insists that British royalty shall treat him as an equal. 
He rules, with a none too gentle hand, over a state less 
than one-sixth in area, but whose population is more 
than one-half that of Minnesota and, himself living 
in a past age, he discourages his people in every pos- 
sible way from adopting modern ideas. Automobiles 
are taboo in his realm; and even the state carriages, 
which he condescendingly permits visitors to use in lieu 
thereof, are of a vintage long obsolete in the outside 
world, as are also the threadbare liveries of the coach- 
men who drive them. 

Yet despite fossilized ideas and extreme old age 
the Maharana of Udaipur is no slouch of a Nimrod and 
he still takes keen delight in stopping the onrush of a 
tiger. This sport he has reduced to a decidedly efficient 
system, being careful to take no bodily risk in its pursuit. 
On the hills of his realm, watchers equipped with power- 

90 



Some Typical Native States 



fill field glasses are constantly on the look-out, and when 
one of them sights a tiger, or even a leopard or panther, 
the news is promptly flashed from hilltop to hilltop by 
heliograph. When it reaches the palace, His Highness 
hurries off to the shooting-box nearest "the front", and 
once safely ensconced thereon takes his ease while a small 
army of beaters drive the quarry within range of his 
guns. Protruding above the foliage of the low growing 
jungle the walls of these fortress-like "boxes" may be 
seen at frequent intervals all over the landscape; and as 
many of them bear evidence of considerable antiquity 
the wonder is that any big game at all is left in the 
country. For in Udaipur there is no closed season for 
the benefit of tigers and their lordly brethren. Since 
time immemorial they have been subjected to this same 
systematic slaughter. 

In this queer old capital of what is perhaps the 
most backward of India's native states it seems pass- 
ing strange to find a modern penal institution. Yet, 
barring its whipping-post and the practice of keeping 
the convicts in irons (irons that reach from ankle to 
waist) , the state prison of Udaipur is not only modern in 
construction and appointments but almost a model in 
its methods. Never have we seen a cleaner, more 
sanitary, better ordered place of the kind, nor one 
whose inmates apparently were more reconciled to their 
lot. Everyone was at work, either carding, spinning 
or weaving, or in turning pottery, and the whole 
institution hummed with industry like a busy 
factory. Paroles are an unknown luxury in Udaipur's 
criminal code; every prisoner must serve his full time. 

91 



Some TypicoTNative States 



Perhaps the absence of uncertainty on that point 
explains in some measure why the convicts seem to accept 
their punishment so philosophically. 

The last night of our stay in the Maharana's do- 
minions, a crew of royal but ragged oarsmen rowed us 
across beautiful Lake Pichola in state barges that 
had seen better days. One of the marble pavilion- 
crowned islands at the further end of the lake was our 
objective, and, true to Udaipur form, it proved 
less enchanting on close acquaintance than afar off. 
But we were richly rewarded for making the trip, be- 
cause it afforded a strikingly different, yet no less 
charming, view of the quaint old town and the huge 
palace that bestrides it than that on which our eyes 
had been feasting from the veranda of our barracks- 
like hotel. The sun hung low over the western hills, 
and as its level rays gilded the towers and fired the 
windows on the opposite shore we once more found 
ourselves gazing on a celestial city, forgetting the 
ugliness which its ancient walls concealed. 

Baroda 

After the senile mediaevalism of Udaipur one is 
scarcely prepared for the twentieth-century snap and vig- 
or of Baroda. The night we stepped from our train on to 
the brilliantly illuminated platform of Baroda's fine 
railway station the contrast between these neighbor- 
ing native states began to be apparent at once. It 
became increasingly apparent when, instead of being 
rushed off by the frenzied driver of some unspeakable 
wheeled contraption to an equally unspeakable hotel, 
we were conducted in an up-to-date auto bus to the royal 

92 



Some Typical Native States 



guest house which, in the absence of other hotel accommo- 
dations, the native ruler of this little realm courteously 
throws open to the tired traveler, provided he be prop- 
erly credentialed and previously booked. To our 
still further surprise we found an excellent course dinner 
awaiting us in this cozy, home-like place, a dinner which 
in all its appointments would have done credit to any 
first class metropolitan hotel. Some shock, after the 
sort of culinary grief, grudging hospitality and all round 
discomfort to which we had lately been subjected! 

We speak of these first impressions of Baroda be- 
cause they typify so many equally pleasing ones which 
came afterward. The city itself, population 100,000, is 
full of agreeable surprises to those just arrived from the 
jungle-desert towns of Rajputana. It has a modern 
water system and electric light plant. Its principal 
streets are wide and well paved, and are kept constantly 
clean by the ceaseless sweeping of hundreds of the lowest 
of low caste "untouchables," mostly women. Sub- 
stantial public edifices, municipal, school, library and 
hospital buildings, are to be seen on every hand. There 
is a fine park containing an unusually interesting zoologi- 
cal collection, also a pretentious museum of native art 
and industry which in several important respects has no 
equal in India. While the inevitable Hindu temple is a 
common sight, its influence is measurably curtailed by a 
system of compulsory but free education, supplemented 
by an excellent technical school and a thriving branch 
of the Bombay University. 

For all of these blessings, credit is due to the pro- 
gressive, wide-awake prince who rules, with the title of 

93 



Some Typical Native States 



Gaekwar, over the 8,000 square miles and 2,000,000 
people of the state. Despite the comparatively insig- 
nificant size of his domain he is reputed to be one of the 
wealthiest of Indian princes, and many regard him as 
the most enlightened one. He has had an English 
university education and has traveled extensively in 
foreign lands, the trip to America nearly 20 years ago, 
when he was entertained by President Roosevelt at the 
White House, being a particularly memorable one. 
Much of his time is spent in Switzerland, where he owns 
a fine old castle on the shores of Lake Geneva and from 
which he keeps in close touch with affairs at home. 

His Highness was compelled to be in Bombay at 
the time of our visit to his capital, and that cruel cir- 
cumstance deprived him of the pleasure of making our 
acquaintance; but before leaving Baroda he had thought- 
fully instructed an orderly to show us through the royal 
palaces, of which there are two in that neighborhood 
and several more elsewhere. The oldest and largest 
of these establishments is located in a great park some 
six miles from the city and was erected long ago by one 
of the Gaekwar's princely forebears. Though somewhat 
less garish in tone than those of the great palace at 
Udaipur, its furnishings would nevertheless give a 
modern interior decorator nervous prostration. 

The smaller palace in the outskirts of the city 
(a diminutive term sounds queer when applied to so huge 
a pile) is decorated and furnished in much more artistic 
fashion, and we spent delightful hours wandering through 
its labyrinth of lofty rooms. Here the Gaekwar makes 
his permanent home, and when we went to visit it every- 

94 



Some Typical Native States 



thing was thrown open to our inspection, save only the 
private apartments of his wife. 

We were particularly interested in the room where 
this swarthy-faced and highly intelligent potentate tran- 
sacts the affairs of state and attends to the details of his 
manifold business enterprises. The furniture was mas- 
sive but in excellent taste and no convenience of a modern 
office was lacking, whether typewriter, correspondence 
files, call bells or any other time-saver. In a bookcase 
within easy reach of the Gaekwar's large flat top desk 
were the leading English, American and French maga- 
zines of the day. It was just such a workshop as that in 
which many an American governor, mayor or business 
man grinds out his daily grist. 

This ornate palace of mixed Moorish and Indian 
design stands in the midst of a wooded park whose palm- 
fringed driveways, close-cropped lawns, stately fountains 
and wealth of flowers denote the expert care of an up-to- 
date landscape gardener. The home of the Gaekwar of 
Baroda is as lovely without as within, and had we seen no 
other examples of how the native princes of India attempt 
to beautify their establishments we might have left the 
country with glowing stories of their good taste. 

Ten minutes in a motor car across town, and we ar- 
rive at the royal stables, where interest centers in the 
state elephants. The herd numbers twenty-two huge 
chaps, each of whom could easily qualify, both in size 
and sagacity, for a stellar role in any American circus. 
In an adjoining building is housed a prodigious array 
of state howdahs. There are single, double and four- 
seated howdahs; howdahs for tiger hunts, for funerals, 



95 



Some Typical Native States 



weddings and festivals, each with its appropriate accom- 
paniment of gold, silver and jewel encrusted trappings. 
On gala days, when all the proud peanut eaters fare forth 
in their Sunday best, one wonders how the elephant ward- 
robe master, or whatever they call him, can untangle 
this mass of sumptuous finery without the aid of a card 
Index. 

In another building near by we spent some time 
inspecting the ordnance department of the Gaekwar's 
*'army." This consists of two pieces of artillery no 
larger than the French "75s", yet in all the world there 
are no cannon like them, for one is of solid gold and the 
other of solid silver! We were surprised to learn that 
this extraordinary battery has never fired anything more 
expensive than common iron shot. One would think 
that platinum cased, diamond loaded shrapnel would be 
none too good for such costly field pieces. 

By far the most remarkable sight in Baroda is the 
Gaekwar's celebrated collection of crown jewels, said to 
be the most costly privately owned collection in existence. 
Among its treasures are a pearl necklace valued at 
$500,000, besides one of diamonds, (headed by the great 
*'Star of the South" stone) whose valuation is placed 
at a paltry $1,000,000. Originally the "Star" weighed 254 
carats, but today, in consequence of repeated cuttings, 
it weighs only 125! The collection also contains enough 
exquisitely mounted sapphire, emerald and ruby pieces 
to stagger any Rue de la Paix or Fifth Avenue jeweler, 
and by way of extreme novelty includes a carpet into 
whose pattern are woven thousands of genuine pearls. 

You must not assume from our enthusiasm over 

96 



Some Typical Native States 



Baroda's modern aspects that it is by any means lacking 
in oriental color. Any such idea would quickly be dis- 
pelled should you chance to get caught in the maelstrom 
of its teeming life on market day, as we did the morning 
of our departure for Bombay. At such a time you would 
see a wide street packed for blocks, and from curb to 
curb, with a mass of seething, shouting, gesticulating 
Hindus in their white, or once white, turbans and flowing 
tunics, and sandwiched amongst them every imaginable 
sort of burden-laden beast — a picture of the East through 
and through, but a better fed, better clothed, apparently 
happier East than we have seen anywhere outside 
of Burma. 



97 



RURAL INDIA, NATIVE TRAVEL AND 
THE RAILWAYS 

February 1922 

IT is one thing to cross the continent of India by a 
route along which cities of such surpassing interest 
as Benares, Agra, Delhi, Jaipur and Baroda are 
constantly breaking one's journey, and quite another 
thing to recross it by a route which offers no such be- 
guiling interruptions. The truth of this observation 
was borne in on us as we completed the thirty-two hour 
trip from Bombay on the Arabian Sea over to 
Madras, where we again found ourselves on the shores 
of the Bay of Bengal, — a hot, dusty, tedious trip at best 
but in this instance rendered the more unbearable by the 
thoughtfulness of the G. I. P. railway's management in 
assigning to us its star piece of rolling stock, a "private" 
carriage unrivaled in all India for antiquity, dirt, flat 
tires and red ants. 

Yet it was a trip that had its compensations. Our 
train was slow and inclined to loiter at every station, 
hence we were afforded a much better opportunity to 
study the rural life of the country, the characteristics of 
native travelers and the manner in which the business of 
railroading is conducted than was possible on the hop, 
skip and jump journey from Calcutta across to Bombay. 

Dealing with the above subjects in their order, it 
should first be remarked that 70 out of every 100 of 
India's inhabitants are agriculturists, producing practi- 
cally every known crop, from wheat, corn, barley, rye and 
jute in the North, to rice, cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, 

98 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

copra and indigo in the South. Under present conditions 
the cultivator, or ryot, as the farmer is called, realizes a 
net income of four or five annas a day, less than ten 
cents gold, from his produce, and with this he manages to 
eke out a bare existence. When occasionally he sets out 
for the nearest city, bent on a genuinely big time, he in- 
sures himself abundant capital for the excursion by loading 
his donkey with a 150-pound cargo of sun-baked cow 
dung, for which city dwellers in need of fuel may pay 
him a whole rupee, or about 28 cents gold at the present 
rate of exchange. 

The isolated farm house is an almost unknown sight 
in India, practically all of the ryots congregating together 
in little mud villages where they spend their dark, cheer- 
less nights and from whence they sally forth at dawn 
each morning for a long day's toil in the neighboring 
fields. Rural India, as seen from a train window, con- 
vinces one that the people as a whole must be living 
substantially the same lives that their ancestors lived 
centuries ago, in which particular our impressions of 
India and China are identical. 

Because of the uncertain rainfall, farming in many 
sections of the country is largely dependent upon irriga- 
tion. During recent years most of the important streams 
have been systematically bled in order to furnish water 
for the land, so much so, in fact, that during the dry 
season many of them are little more than winding 
rivers of sand. Yet notwithstanding the gov- 
ernment's numerous and costly irrigation projects, 
the chief supply of water continues to come from 
the primitive wells of the cultivators. One of the 

99 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

most familiar sights of India is a team of long- 
horned bullocks making repeated trips down an 
inclined pathway from the rim of one of these ancient 
wells, furnishing the power which lifts a huge skin of 
water from the depths below to be fed by the ryot into 
his little system of irrigating canals. 

In a land where modern reapers and threshers have 
made no perceptible headway against those ancient 
hand implements, the sickle and the flail, — where a 
chilled plow is still a curiosity and where most travel 
continues to be done afoot, in bullock carts or astride 
asses and camels — it seems incongruous in the extreme 
to find railways. Yet here they are and, mile for mile, 
they handle about the heaviest traffic in the world, in 
folks if not freight. Where people are counted by the 
hundreds of millions and where railway development is 
still in its infancy, a very small proportion of the popu- 
lation can easily crowd the trains to capacity. 

On the westbound trip from Calcutta we had been 
impressed by the tremendous number of natives who 
were everywhere on the go, and this long trip back to the 
eastern coast only served to strengthen the impression. 
Seemingly all India was rushing to and fro over the G.I. P. 
Our own train was made up of two or three alleged first 
class carriages, but most of the wretched looking multi- 
tude journeying our way was herded together like sheep 
in the bare compartments of an endless string of third 
class cars. Constantly we met other trains likewise 
packed to suffocation with humanity of the same pitiable 
type, while at every stop, particularly during the small 
hours of the night when we were vainly seeking an oc- 

100 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

casional wink of sleep, it seemed as though all creation 
was surging up and down the long stone platforms. 

We remarked to a railway official that general 
conditions must be better than we had been led to 
believe, since such throngs of people were continually 
racing about the country, apparently on important 
business. To this he laughingly replied that real 
business had no bearing whatever on the errands of 
most native travelers, that as a matter of fact more than 
75 per cent of the third class traffic fell under three heads ; 
first, religious fanatics bent on a pilgrimage to some holy 
shrine; second, people journeying to some family cere- 
mony or rite, such as a betrothal, a wedding, a christening 
or a funeral; third, litigants and their witnesses headed 
for the law courts. According to this official, one of the 
chief national pastimes in India is litigation, the average 
native having an incurable weakness for going to law, 
even over the most trivial disputes. 

Our own opinion is that the railways encourage 
much needless travel by the extremely low rates they give 
to third class passengers. A coolie can get transpor- 
tation from Bombay to Madras, 765 miles, for about 8 
rupees, or less than $2.25 in our money. He must, of 
course, provide his own food en route, and the vehicle in 
which he rides is but little better than a cattle car, yet at 
that his discomforts are probably no greater than those to 
which he is accustomed in the hovel he calls home. 

In two noteworthy particulars the railways of 
India are most considerate of the native traveler. At 
every station there is a tap of pure running water from 
which the devout Hindu can fill his brass drinking bowl 

101 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

without danger of contamination from a well where some 
unclean compatriot has quenched his thirst. Separate 
lunch counters for Mohammedan travelers are also 
provided everywhere so that their religious dietetical 
whims may not be jarred. 

To make every one perfectly happy, the railways 
really ought to transport their Mohammedan patrons by 
one set of trains and their Hindu passengers by another, 
and the latter should be provided with cars containing 
compartments of a hundred distinct classes to correspond 
with at least a few of the more important castes. The 
trouble and expense which a high caste Hindu incurs 
in purifying himself after having traveled all night 
in close contact with some "untouchable" is no laughing 
matter, at least to him. Unless the prescribed rites 
of purification are immediately and thoroughly performed 
he speedily finds himself a social outcast. 

Regarding the Indian railways themselves, their con- 
struction, equipment and operating methods: like practi- 
cally all railway systems throughout the Orient the road 
beds are well ballasted and carry a heavy steel rail on which 
the light-weight carriages and goods vans run with remark- 
able smoothness. Grade crossings in the cities and 
towns are invariably protected by gates which swing 
back and forth, alternately blocking highway and 
railway. Double track lines are not uncommon, 
and train movements are quite generally controlled by 
a modern system of block signals, hence collisions, 
either "head on" or "tail end," are almost 
unknown. Trains are started and stopped with a quiet 

102 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

ease most gratifying to one accustomed to the jars and 
jolts of American trains. 

Station buildings and platforms are of the most sub- 
stantial construction, usually of stone or brick, and in the 
larger cities are frequently beautiful in design and 
imposing in size. At most way stops, there are duplicate 
east and west bound stations on opposite sides of the 
right of way, connected by an elevated passage over the 
tracks. Anyone attempting to cross the road bed by 
another route invites arrest as well as accidental injury. 

Tickets are examined at the gate leading to the 
platform and again by the guards on the train, 
but are not surrendered until leaving the station at des- 
tination. All stations in towns of any consequence are 
equipped with both first and second class dining rooms in 
which refreshments of all kinds, including the alcoholic 
variety, are obtainable at moderate prices. Perambu- 
lating lunch stands sell tea and cake at the carriage 
doors to those whose time or means do not permit of a 
full meal in the restaurant. 

With minor variations the foregoing conditions 
obtain in Japan, Korea, China, Java and the Malay 
states as well as in India, but the character of the train 
equipment itself differs considerably in those countries. 
In Japan, on account of the short distances, there is little 
night travel, and what few sleeping cars there are 
are constructed much on the plan of the Euro- 
pean "wagon-lits", with exceedingly cramped, two-berth 
compartments, built athwart the car and opening onto a 
long narrow corridor which runs from end to end of the 

103 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

vehicle. Tiny, and usually very dark, toilet rooms 
are found between alternate compartments. 

Chinese sleeping cars are of a somewhat similar type, 
but in Java there are none at all, for no night trains 
whatever are operated in that country. The journey 
from Batavia to Sourabaya, for example, requires two 
full days, passengers being compelled to lie off over 
night midway between those points. 

The South Manchurian Railway, which the Japanese 
government operates between Fusan and Mukden, is 
equipped with standard American cars, both sleepers and 
coaches, and on that road it seems strange indeed 
to find oneself gazing at the queer sights of Korea and 
Manchuria from the comfortable seat of a Pullman car. 

While digressing, we must not fail to mention 
the odd day coaches of the Japanese railways and the 
equally odd custom of the native passengers who travel 
in them. These coaches apparently have been designed 
on the assumption that the passenger prefers to sit 
sidewise, staring at his fellow travelers across the aisle, 
rather than facing forward to meet the on-coming land- 
scape. Only on that theory can one account for the two 
long vis-a-vis seats which extend the full length of the 
car, as in our old fashioned American street cars. Yet 
nine Japanese out of ten scorn this arrangement. They 
climb up on the seat, turn their backs to those on the 
opposite side, and squatting on their heels gaze out of the 
window. In this position, so awkward and uncomfort- 
able for long western legs, men, women and children 
alike will ride contentedly for hours. 

In India, the designer of first class railway coaches 
104 



Rural India, Native Travel and the Railways 

has given some little thought to the comfort of his vic- 
tims. Here distances are great and there is much night 
travel. Moreover, excessively high temperatures must 
be taken into account, even in winter. Mark Twain, 
you will remember, declared that the only difference 
between India's summer and winter heat is that in sum- 
mer time the door knobs melt, while in winter time they 
merely get mushy! 

Sleeping cars in India are divided into spacious 
compartments twice the length of a Pullman drawing- 
room and extending the full width of the car. Affixed 
to the ceiling of each of these rooms will be found a large 
electric-driven, propeller-blade fan, sometimes two of 
them, while the windows are equipped with heavy 
wooden shutters, effectually barring the rays of the 
merciless midday sun, also the pole and hook with which 
the midnight thief would otherwise fish for your valu- 
ables. Opening off one end of the compartment is an un- 
usually commodious washroom and toilet, sometimes 
equipped with a shower bath, while at the opposite 
end is a narrow cupboard of a room in which one's 
private servants or "bearers, "as they are called, are lodged. 

There are no regular porters on these Indian sleeping 
cars, nor does the railway company furnish bedding for 
the berths. Every first class passenger supplies his own 
sheets, blankets, pillows soap and towels. His bearer 
makes up the berth at night, takes it down in the morn- 
ing and does the sweeping and dusting. At virtually all 
hotels also the bearer does most of the chamber work, 
sleeping at night on the stone floor outside his Sahib's 
( master's) door. 

105 



CITIES AND TEMPLES OF THE SOUTH 

February 1922 

AGONIZING though our experiences were in that 
flat- wheeled, ant-infested derehct which brought us 
down from Bombay, they were soon forgotten 
under the soothing influence of Madras. The magnifi- 
cent ocean drive of that city is alone capable of putting 
one in a mood to forgive his worst enemy, even be he a 
conscienceless railway oflScial, and we motored up and 
down its winding course for hours, filling our lungs 
with the moisture-laden air. 

And there were numerous other attractions which 
helped to divert our minds from the memory of that 
unhappy journey, among them the marine aquarium, 
the only one worthy of the name in India, which con- 
tains even rarer species of fish than those we had seen at 
Honolulu, many of them looking more like birds of bril- 
liant plumage than finny denizens of the sea; and the great 
banyan trees, one of which is locally reputed to be the 
largest of its kind in the world, though our hurried 
measurements showed it to be considerably smaller 
than the real title holder at Calcutta whose top is 
1000 feet in circumference and most of whose 
enormous weight is supported by the nearly 600 aerial 
roots which its wide-spreading branches give off; also 
the ancient Hindu temples with their immense 
tanks of sacred water, quite as foul as the tanks of 
Benares, along with the almost equally ancient Catholic 
cathedrals, one of which claims to treasure the remains 
of St. Thomas the Apostle in its dungeon-like crypt. 

106 



Cities and Temples of the South 



Whatever may be thought of this claim, there appears 
to be much evidence in and around Madras tending to 
prove that the doubting disciple did Hve and preach in 
this vicinity toward the close of his life. 

This metropolis of the South should easily qualify as 
the religious storm-center of India, for here the most con- 
flicting creeds are in direct competition. The Moham- 
medan fez is much in evidence, though less so than in 
some of the northern cities; the Brahman caste mark 
disfigures many a Hindu forehead; here both Catholics 
and Protestants maintain thriving organizations; here, 
too is found the inspirational world headquarters of The- 
osophy, the palatial estates of Madame Blavatsky and 
Annie Besant attesting the fact that in this far-off land 
they, as well as Mrs. Tingley at Point Loma, California, 
have had no difficulty in attracting wealthy disciples. 

Journeying south from Madras on our way to Ceylon 
we made hurried calls at Tan j ore, Madura and Trichi- 
nopoly to see the remarkable Hindu temples of those 
cities. The religious architecture of southern India, 
known as the Dravidian type, is wholly unlike that of 
the North. Here, the shrines are enclosed in a series 
of great rectangular courts whose gateways are 
surmounted by immense towers called gopurams, in shape 
resembling somewhat the truncated pyramidal pylons of 
Egyptian temples, and with surfaces carved deep with a 
mass of bas-relief sculptures. 

The most imposing of these sanctuaries, that at 
Madura, covers nearly 15 acres of ground and is sur- 
rounded by no less than nine such gateway towers, one 
of them 152 feet high and all of them embellished with 



107 



Cities and Temples of the South 



profuse carvings depicting notable events and per- 
sonages of Indian antiquity. Perhaps the most striking 
feature of this wonder temple is its "Hall of 1000 Pillars," 
a vast chamber whose granite roof is supported by 997 
beautifully engraved stone columns. So closely are these 
huge pillars set together that even on the sunniest day 
the chamber is in semi-darkness and one half gropes his 
way through its echoing spaces as through the twilight 
shades of a primeval forest. It is the only refuge in the 
whole stupendous edifice where the visitor can escape 
being poked at by the alms-begging temple elephants; 
such a thick stand of monumental timber they simply 
can't squeeze their way through. 

At Trichinopoly we abandoned our quest of Dra vi- 
dian architecture long enough to pay tribute to the 
memory of that grand old missionary who more than a 
century ago set all Christendom singing 

**From Greenland's icy mountains, 
From India's coral strand." 
Only by chance did we learn late one evening that Bishop 
Heber is buried in the quaint English church not far from 
the railway station, and it was with considerable diffi- 
culty that we located its sexton and prevailed upon him 
to bring his lantern and point out the simple slab in 
the chancel beneath which the body of the great hymn 
writer lies. As we stood there in the flickering light and 
contrasted the peaceful quiet of that chaste little church 
with the noisy hubbub of the pagan temple hard by, we 
seemed to sense more clearly than ever before the gulf 
which separates the religions of East and West. 

A few mornings later, as we raised the curtain of our 

108 



Cities and Temples of the South 



sleeping car window for a first glimpse of Ceylon, having 
landed on its northern coast after dark the night before, 
we realized how apt were those other familiar lines of 
Bishop Heber's — 

"What though the spicy breezes 

Blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle; 

Though every prospect pleases, 

And only man is vile," 
— for here the drab, sun-baked plains, of which we had 
grown so eye weary of late, had suddenly given way to 
fertile valleys andJgreen-clad,|cloud-wreathed mountains. 



109 



-THE UNCANNY SIDE OF INDIA 

March 1922 

"The poor benighted Hindu, 

He does the best he kin do, 

He sticks to his caste from first to last, 

And for pants, he makes his skin do." 

DID we really see all these bewildering sights, or 
was it merely a *'pipe?" Have we really been 
roaming up and down, back and forth, through 
the vast stretches of mysterious India the past six weeks 
— observing at close range a welter of poverty-stricken 
people who number nearly a fifth of the human 
race — or are we just awaking from a terrible, in 
many respects a terribly beautiful, dream? As we rub 
our eyes and ask ourselves this question, some of the 
bizarre pictures which haunt our recollection are these: 

Those "sacred" cows placidly chewing their cuds as 
they wander along the sidewalks and through the 
colonnades of Calcutta's finest business streets, and 
those even more sacred bulls insolently shouldering 
their way through throngs of worshippers at the very 
altars of Hindu temples all over the country — 

That strange sanctuary in India's Mecca where for 
ages the ape has been idolized, and where the troops of 
long-tailed monkeys which today inhabit the place seem 
as much at home as do their fellow deities in the old 
Chinese snake temple down at Penang — 

That ultra-sacred north shore of the Ganges, a river 
of respectable origin and early chastity which in later 

110 



The Uncanny Side of India 



life, particularly when passing the aforesaid holy Mecca, 
becomes so contaminated by the foul rites of a heathenish 
creed that it must needs spew its filth into the sea through 
a dozen mouths. There, at Benares, we see thousands 
of pilgrims from all over India devoutly scrubbing them- 
selves in these sanctified waters. There, too, is witnessed 
every gruesome detail of a ritualistic Hindu cremation — 
the white-shrouded body bound to a rude wooden frame 
soaking in the muddy current while waiting its turn at 
the burning ghat; the remains, thus purified, stretched 
on a pyre of oil-sprinkled fagots; the ceremonial circling 
of the pyre seven times by the nearest male relative of 
the deceased — father, son, husband, or brother — before he 
applies the torch; then the ghastly spectacle of a 
charred and twisted human form recoiling in mute 
protest at the shame of its public exposure; and 
finally, the scattering of its ashes on those murky waters 
which every orthodox Hindu holds potent to heal in 
this life and to save eternally in the next — 

And that scarcely less gruesome sight in the beautiful 
cemetery of the Parsees at Bombay, which overlooks the 
stately homes of many of the members of this strange 
but affluent Indo-Persian sect and which commands, as 
well, superb views of the great city and the blue Arabian 
Sea beyond. Here, on the copings of the famed '^Towers 
of Silence," perch hundreds of greedy vultures waiting 
expectantly for the feast of human flesh which the daily, 
sometimes thrice daily, funeral cortege is sure to bring. 
To be born a Bombay Parsee and to spend one's years in 
plain sight of these beckoning towers, knowing that 

111 



The Uncanny Side of India 



sooner or later one's bones will there be picked dry by 
ravenous birds, would, to most people, mean a harrowing 
existence, yet apparently the Parsees are the most cheer- 
ful, light-hearted folk in all gay Bombay — 

That cadaverous old Yogi who leads you unscathed 
over a bed of red-hot coals in your bare feet and who 
offers to demonstrate further his occult powers, and in- 
cidentally confound the anatomists, by removing and 
then replacing, through his mouth, the entire thirty feet 
or more of his alimentary canal — 

That frenzied sun-worshipper whose trained optic 
nerve permits him to stand by the hour with wide-open 
eyes gazing squarely at the orb whose direct rays, in 
India, so easily spell death to ordinary mortals — 

That robust ascetic of disdainful mien who eight 
years ago staked out for himself a claim 20 feet square 
just beyond the city walls of old Udaipur, and who 
since then has never once set foot outside his cramped 
domain. Bareheaded and practically naked, dependent 
for sustenance entirely on the gifts of food and drink 
tendered by his credulous devotees, this "holy man" holds 
high court year in and year out on a rickety bamboo 
throne, his body impervious alike to the blazing heat of 
summer and the chilling blasts of winter. During all 
these years never known to utter an audible 
word, although to those who seek his counsel on matters 
either spiritual or worldly, or who require the aid of his 
supposed prophetic vision, he pencils cryptic notes on a 
slate, provided they pay homage by entering his sacred 
precincts barefooted and with uncovered head* The 

112 



The Uncanny Side of India 



only relaxation this strange creature permits himself is 
to stretch his naked body for slumber at nightfall on a 
bed of jagged rocks three feet distant from his daytime 
perch — 

A whole band of like holy men encamped by the 
roadside far up on the slopes of Mount Abu, that an- 
cient abode of the gods. The night is crisp, for the 
altitude is high, and unsanctified folk find good use 
for heavy wraps, yet here a score or more of 
these priestly pilgrims squat unconcernedly in 
the open with no other covering than a tangled thatch of 
greasy hair, a smear of ashes from head to foot and a strip 
of cotton cloth about the loins. Their only warmth 
comes from a few smouldering heaps of dried cow 
dung, that universal fuel of India, also, perhaps, from the 
mystic inner fire which shines through their eyes and 
which apparently helps to make them, and the 600,000 
others of their kind with which the country is afflicted, 
immune to physical discomfort. To our amazement one 
of these wild looking men suddenly steps forward and 
politely addresses us in faultless English. In the heart 
to heart talk that follows he admits he is a graduate of 
Calcutta University and that he fought with the British 
in France. On returning to India after the Armistice he 
became convinced that the only way to get "at one" with 
his Maker and thus be of real help to his relatives and 
friends was to detach himself from the world, seek a cave 
and in its solitude spend his remaining days in pious 
meditation. He had already picked out his cave and 
was on the way thither when he fell in with his present 
companions and was persuaded to join them on their 

113 



The Uncanny Side of India 



pilgrimage to the Dilwarra temples before settling down 
to his introspective existence. Questioned as to his 
religious theories and beliefs he gives ready and evidently- 
sincere replies — no Catholic, Methodist or Christian 
Scientist could be surer of his theological grounds — but 
when pressed to explain what would happen to civiliza- 
tion if everyone should cultivate the cave habit in order 
to save his soul we lose him in a haze of Hindu 
metaphysics altogether too dense for western minds. 
Warmly clad, yet shivering from the cold, we 
climb back into our rickshas and go on, while our 
ascetic friend, his naked body aglow and the fire of a 
zealot burning in his eyes, rejoins his wild companions. 
As affecting fuel and clothing expense, his religion seems 
to possess some advantages over ours — 

But the bizarre side of India is by no means confined 
to sacred cows and monkeys, wild-eyed holy men, un- 
canny funeral rites or the marvelous magic of the Yogi. 
At every turn one also encounters the snake charmer, 
who for a few rupees will stage a mock battle between 
his once deadly but now fangless cobra and its hereditary 
enemy, the mongoose, which latter, for the purposes of such 
exhibition, has been trained to avoid carefully the knock- 
out blow, or rather bite; the ubiquitous juggler, many of 
whose mystifying tricks would make a Hermann or 
Keller green with envy ; also the omnipresent mendicant, 
whose number is incalculable and who has elevated the 
profession of begging to a fine art. No Rockefeller could 
satisfy the greed of his tribe and remain solvent. Final- 
ly, one constantly meets with most disagreeable remind- 
ers that every living beast, whether it walks, creeps, crawls 
or flies, is a privileged character in Hindu eyes. 

114 



The Uncanny Side of India 



India is not only overburdened with humans but it 
is tremendously overrun with beasts. The multitudinous 
religions of its people seem to vie with each other in the 
protection of brute life. All over the country one finds 
animal hospitals where diseased or aged cattle, sheep, 
goats, even dogs, cats and birds are piously permitted to 
die a lingering death, for to put them mercifully out of 
their misery would be a sin. In fact, to such extremes 
do some of the monkish orders, those of the Jains in 
particular, carry the idea of animal preservation that 
they sweep the ground before them as they walk 
for fear some worthy lizard or worm may be crushed 
under foot. Other and still more fanatical sects swath 
mouth and nostrils with muslin, lest by chance they inhale 
and thus destroy some microscopic inhabitant of the air. 

In consequence of this sort of religious mania the 
country is infested with animal pests of every kind 
and description. Take crows, for example. We de- 
voutly hope never again to cross the path of a 
crow. India swarms with them and they seem particu- 
larly partial to its hotels, about which they circle in 
countless numbers at break of day, rendering sleep 
impossible with their shrill, discordant "caws." It is no 
uncommon thing for them to invade one's apartments at 
that hour in the hope of sharing the chota-hazri, as the 
early bedroom breakfast is called. 

And the wretched, half -famished dogs! If there 
really are 319,000,000 human beings in India, each of 
them must certainly possess one or more dogs. Fur- 
thermore, 90 per cent of the canine population 
spends its nights either in lusty gossip, in baying at 

115 



The Uncanny Side of India 



the moon, or in loudly challenging its ancient enemy, 
the jackal, who, himself, is an accomplished howler. 
We have always been an ardent lover of the dog but the 
animal known in India as such makes no more of a hit 
with us in the daytime than when he keeps us awake 
nights. He is a mongrel of the worst type with a mangey 
hide through which the bones seem likely to protrude at 
any moment. His eye is dull and apathetic and ages ago 
he completely lost the knack of wagging his tail. When 
you take pity on his starved condition he grabs the food 
and slinks away with a growl; when you refuse to feed 
him he turns a sullen eye on you and snarls. He has 
lost all self respect through living for centuries among a 
people whose religion forbids them to take his life and 
whose poverty is so great that they cannot afford to sus- 
tain it decently. 

Wild monkeys, which at first were a great novelty, 
soon became so commonplace that we paid little more 
attention to them than to gophers at home. But our in- 
terest in the saucy fellows revived, when on the 
narrow-guage road running from Udaipur to Chitorgahr 
we found they had a thrifty habit of riding the trains 
between stations to forage among the lunch baskets 
of travelers. 

Of deadly beasts, such as lions, tigers, panthers and 
poisonous snakes, we saw nothing outside of zoological 
gardens, yet that India still abounds with wild animals is 
evidenced by the fact that as recently as 1920 no less than 
1,507 natives were killed by tigers alone, while for years 
past the annual death toll from snake bites has been 
upwards of 20,000. 

116 



The Uncanny Side of India 



True we did see some wild hogs, many of them in 
fact. That was at Udaipur, where the sporty old prince 
who holds forth there has erected a kind of grandstand 
on the edge of the jungle from which his visitors can 
observe in safety the robust table manners of these 
hideous beasts. Regularly every night, just before sun- 
set, hundreds of them troop down from the hills to tear 
at each other's throats over the shelled corn which they 
know will be thrown to them at that hour. The fierce melee 
that follows on the rocky floor of the gorge defies des- 
cription and while no actual dead or wounded were left 
on the field of battle the night of our visit, we suspect 
that the score or more of bleeding combatants who went 
limping away were not able to enter the ring soon 
again. After witnessing this savage "free for all" we 
decided that a respectable tiger might be a pleasanter 
chance acquaintance in an Indian jungle than one of 
these loathsome, screaming creatures. 

India is unquestionably the greatest show on earth, 
and even its most gifted and enthusiastic press agents, 
writers like Kipling and Edwin Arnold, cannot be accused 
of having overdrawn it. It is the world's one huge 
hippodrome where everything advertised is shown. While 
the freakish side of the picture seems at the moment to 
impress us particularly, we shall doubtless, in the years 
to come, dwell longer and with far more pleasure on its 
grand and inspiring aspects. 



117 



. CAPTIVATING CEYLON 

March 1922 

TN many respects Ceylon is a pocket edition of Java, 
and to avoid something of an anti-climax one should 
see it before visiting the latter. It has the same 
wealth of tropical vegetation, though the species differ 
considerably; the same combination of wild mountain 
scenery and intensively cultivated fields, though 
the mountains are neither so high, so rugged nor so vol- 
canic, while the plantations run more largely to tea, 
rubber and cocoanuts than to rice, sugar and coffee. 

At first, Ceylon impressed us as being almost as 
much of a human ant-hill as Java. Particularly in and 
about its capital, Colombo, humanity seems to swarm 
as thickly as anywhere on earth. Yet taking the island 
as a whole, (area 25,000 square miles, population 4,000- 
000,) it has less than one-fifth as many people to the square 
mile as Java. At that, its density of population is four 
times as great as ours in dear old U. S. A. 

As bearing on the Java comparison, what the Sin- 
halese lack in quantity they make up in quality, for 
unquestionably they are far more advanced than their 
island brethren on the other side of the equator. Few 
Javanese ever succeed in raising themselves above the 
peasant level, whereas thousands of Sinhalese have be- 
come well-to-do business and professional men. The 
Dutch have done little to encourage the religious or 
educational development of their South Sea subjects 
and doubtless this fact, coupled with the intensive heat 
of their somewhat more tropical climate, accounts in 

118 



Captivating Ceylon 



large measure for their backwardness. Ceylon is a crown 
colony of Great Britian and as such has long enjoyed the 
benefit of progressive institutions. One sees more school 
and church edifices there in an hour than in Java in a 
whole week. 

While most of the Christian denominations are 
represented on the island, and while the large Tamil 
population, which has drifted across from South India, 
adheres to the Hindu faith, the bulk of the people are 
Buddhists. Ceylon is one of the last remaining world 
strongholds of Buddhism, ranking in that respect next 
to Burma and Japan, we should say. Its Y. M. B. A., 
modeled on the lines of our Y. M. C. A., is a flourishing 
and aggressive institution. 

At Kandy, a delightfully picturesque mountain town 
50 miles back from the coast, stands a sanctuary known 
as the "Temple of the Tooth" to which thousands of 
Buddhists from the far corners of the Orient make pil- 
grimages each year. This temple contains a relic which 
probably has been revered by more people, at this and 
other well-authenticated locations where for 2000 years 
it has been jealously guarded, than any other religious 
relic the world has ever known. Although on the 
occasion of the great annual festival for which Kandy is 
famed it is borne aloft through the streets in a golden 
casket, no one save royalty is ever permitted to look 
upon it. It consists of a piece of ivory two inches long 
and one inch thick, resembling the tooth of a crocodile 
much more than that of a man, yet countless millions 
venerate it as a genuine molar from the mouth of 
Buddha himself! 

119 



Captivating Ceylon 



Speaking of Kandy, one of its most novel sights is 
the daily bath of the temple elephants. Of these there 
are a score or more and regularly every afternoon they 
are driven to the shores of a nearby stream where they 
take to the water with as much apparent delight as any 
American boy to his "ole swimmin' hole." After play- 
fully drenching their keepers, using their trunks like 
garden hose for the purpose, they lie down obediently 
in the bed of the stream and meekly permit themselves 
to be scrubbed till every inch of their expansive areas is 
made as clean as a whistle. 

We find the elephants of Ceylon much more 
interesting than any we have seen elsewhere for here one 
comes upon them in the most unexpected places and 
engaged in the most extraordinary occupations. The 
other day we chanced upon a big fellow busily at work 
laying the stone foundations of a dam. The calculat- 
ing eye with which he scanned the pile of rocks before 
selecting one of proper size and shape, and the precision 
with which he afterwards deposited it in its 
proper place, lent plausability to the most improbable 
stories we had ever heard about the intelligence of 
these royal beasts. 

In the development of young rubber plantations it 
becomes necessary from time to time to thin out the grow- 
ing trees, and for such work the planters of Ceylon find a 
single elephant worth a dozen coolies. The process by 
elephant power is simple in the extreme. His Highness 
carefully wraps trunk about trunk, crouches low to get 
the proper purchase and then with a mighty grunt hauls 

120 



Captivating Ceylon 



the tree forth, roots and all, as easily as a gardener would 
pull out a stubborn weed. 

In the unique museum connected with the Royal 
Botanical Gardens near Kandy one will see some of the 
most freakish curiosities of the vegetable kingdom known 
to botanists. Among them is by for the oddest freak of the 
animal kingdom we ever saw. It is popularly known as 
the "living leaf insect" but zoologists speak of it in their 
glib, off-hand way as the phyllium pulchriphy Ilium. 
Irregular in shape, like the large leaf on which it feeds, 
almost as thin and exactly the same color, its size is about 
two by three inches. At a distance of five feet from this 
plant-like creature no one would suspect its presence, 
but on close examination, what at first looked like the 
jagged edges of a normal leaf, proves to be the arms, legs 
and protruding mouth of a very hungry animal, energeti- 
cally engaged in devouring the vegetable life which it 
resembles so perfectly. 

That Ceylon had a civilization many ages ago is 
evidenced by the ancient ruins one encounters all over 
the country. The most extensive of these are at Anurad- 
hapura, in the north central part of the island. Here the 
scattered remains of forts, palaces, temples and tombs 
prove convincingly that sometime in the dim past, 
doubtless long before the Christian era, there existed at 
this place a great metropolis which actually covered more 
territory than London does today. But neither here nor 
elsewhere are the historic ruins of Ceylon in a recogniz- 
able state. Nowhere will one see anything to compare 
with the tolerably well preserved thousand-year-old 
granite pile of Bourobudur in Java. 

121 



Captivating Ceylon 



As in Java, the principal towns of Ceylon are con- 
nected by an excellent government-owned railway, while 
hard-surfaced highways reach out all over the island. 
Automobiles are plentiful and the motorist is in little 
danger of breaking the speed laws, for in the mountains 
he must negotiate precipitous roads full of dangerous 
hair-pin turns while in the ''Low Country," where huge- 
wheeled bullock carts often completely span the narrow 
thoroughfares with their swaying loads of tea, rubber 
and cocoanuts, cautious driving is absolutely imperative. 

Should you ever chance this way do not let anyone 
persuade you that a motor trip to Kandy will suffice to 
make you acquainted with the interior of Ceylon. You 
must at least go on up to Nuwara Eliya, a place much 
less terrifying to call by name than its spelling would 
indicate, being pronounced New-Rail-Ya. It is a charm- 
ing mountain resort to which everyone in Colombo, who 
can, flees to escape the debilitating summer heat of the 
coastal regions. Your visit to Ceylon, like ours, doubtless 
will be made in one of the winter months and you will 
therefore see but little of this "hill" society life. Never- 
theless, the trip to Nuwara Eliya is well worth making 
at any time of the year, if only to enjoy the magnificent 
views which constantly unfold both going and returning, 
and to see at close range something of Ceylon's two 
principal industries, the production of tea and rubber. 
Up to an altitude of 3000 feet, you are constantly passing 
through rubber plantations. At that point, the rubber 
tree goes out of business and the tea bush takes its place. 
After motoring for hours through tea "gardens," which 
cover the mountains far and near with their symmetri- 

122 



Captivating Ceylon 



cal designs, you will wonder how there can be enough 
addicts of the 5 o'clock habit in all the world to consume 
the output of these green, billowy fields. 

Colombo, like all English governed cities of the East, 
has its European quarter, with wide, well-paved streets, 
substantial business blocks, handsome public buildings, 
vine-clad villas and the inevitable race-track, cricket 
field and polo grounds. But its native quarter is typically 
oriental, while its Jetty presents almost as cosmopolitan an 
aspect as the Esplanade at Singapore. For Colombo, like 
its Malay rival, is situated at something of a maritime 
crossroads where dark-skinned wanderers of every shade, 
sailors from the seven seas, come ashore while their ships 
are coaling. But none of these oddly-attired, often well- 
nigh- unattired visitors, are any more curious in appearance 
than the bareheaded men of Ceylon themselves. The 
latter support their bunched-up tresses with a pair of 
circular tortoise shell combs, stroll about in long gaily- 
colored skirts, and look surprisingly like the prim 
New England spinster of yesterday. 

In Ceylon we have heard less croaking about business 
conditions than anywhere else on the trip. Tea, the 
mainstay of the island, is commanding a fair price and 
all the "factories," as the drying and curing establish- 
ments are called, are running full tilt. Rubber, the next 
most important crop, has at last turned a corner in the 
world's markets, but even during the worst of its recent 
bad days the Ceylon planters seem to have suffered much 
less than those of the Malay states. We are told that 
labor is cheaper here and that rubber can be produced at 

123 



Captivating Ceylon 



a small margin of profit when planters in other parts of 
the Orient cannot afford to tap their trees. 

As a whole, the people of Ceylon seem to be well 
fed and contented, quite in contrast with the thin, 
dejected-looking millions across the narrow strait which 
separates the island from India. Possibly one reason 
why folks over here are so complaisant is because they 
pay practically no taxes, at least none that are visible. 
Nearly all the revenue needed for the support of the 
government is derived from a tax on exports (not imports, 
mind you), and from the very comfortable profits of the 
state-owned railway. 

Thus far we have said little, if anything, about the 
Orient's greatest institution, the retail merchant. Either 
in his own little shop, in the booth of a city bazaar, 
squatting on the floor outside your hotel room, or in- 
vading the train or ship on which you travel, this ingra- 
tiating fellow is forever in pursuit of your last dollar. 
Since his artistry is carried to the Nth. degree in Ceylon 
it seems fitting here to pay a word of tribute to his 
genius. 

The shopping member of our firm started out on her 
travels last October firmly determined to bring home no 
*'junk," and this resolution she adhered to faithfully — 
all the way from San Francisco to Honolulu! Then she 
began to slip and the going has been getting more and 
more slippery ever since, so much so in fact that she has 
not been the only one to slip, her husband having months 
ago become an ambitious though most unskilful 
bargainer himself. 

124 



Captivating Ceylon 



After losing out in a two weeks' catch-as-catch-can 
trading match with the irresistible curio gentry of Japan 
we felt that nothing more disastrous could befall us at 
the hands of their fellow bandits in Korea, China, Java 
and India. But after a long series of humihating 
defeats in those countries it finally dawned on us that 
no mere Westerner can ever hope to defend himself 
against the born traders of the East. Beyond learning 
that "NO!", however strongly emphasized or sharply 
inflected, is absolutely meaningless to the oriental 
salesman, and that his asking price is normally from 
five to ten times his getting price, we left the Asiatic 
mainland no better equipped to resist his wiles than 
when we first sighted it. 

So on reaching Ceylon, the place of all places where 
we should have been in the pink of shopping condition, 
there was little fight left in us. And ever since our arrival 
we have been assailed from all sides by the nerviest, 
and withal cleverest, bunch of commercial beach-combers 
to be found on the globe ! Our first appearance in public 
was signalized by a riot among the street vendors of deck 
chairs (few steamers touching at Colombo being thus 
equipped), and we only succeeded in quelling it by open- 
ing negotiations with the brawniest-looking pirate in 
the throng, who finally forced upon us a pair of wobbly 
rattan seats at half their marked price, and probably 
twice their actual value. Following which, a frantic mob 
of riksha men and taxi drivers swooped down upon us, 
and to escape their clutches we sought refuge in a 
neighboring gem dealer's shop — and were lost! 

We don't expect to find ourselves fully again until, 
125 



Captivating Ceylon 



safe on the Marseilles steamer, we see the coral strands of 
Ceylon fading in the distance. Our main job until then 
is to dodge jewel dealers. For Colombo is one of 
the world's primary gem markets. Half its shops are 
ablaze with precious stones and their proprietors, many of 
whom don't hesitate to strong-arm you in the street, 
have developed the art of salesmanship to an unbelievable 
degree. They seem to possess a clairvoyant capacity 
for gauging the strength of their victim's moral backbone. 
Furthermore, every mother's son of the clan is a 
born hypnotist. 

It avails nothing to plead poverty, to tell plausible 
stories of how all your spare money was spent in India and 
how you have barely enough left to get home. Any such 
attempt to escape your fate is sure to be countered by an 
offer of credit. As an instance: one of the largest of 
these gem dealers (his clairvoyant powers failed him 
this time for he evidently mistook us for people of means) 
urged most insistently that we take along his 22,000 
rupee pearl necklace (marked down from heaven knows 
how many rupees) with the understanding that we should 
have six months time in which to remit, and that we 
need not finally accept it at all if either Cartier or Tiffany 
should appraise it at less than his figure! 

But our recollections of Ceylon will by no means be 
confined to the hide-and-seek game we have been playing 
with its shopkeepers. We shall remember best our long 
motor drives, up in the mountains, out to the gem mines 
of Ratnapura and through the dense cocoanut 
groves which border the sea on the roads leading to Galle 
and Negombo. The spice-scented forests of the foot- 

126 



Captivating Ceylon 



hills, the regiments of itinerant "pluckers" wandering 
from one tea plantation to another, the fishermen 
hauling their nets and sailing their queer out-rigger 
canoes, together with the frequent bands of pilgrims 
toiling their weary way to the top of sacred Mount 
Adam — these will also help to make up the compos- 
ite picture which we shall carry away of captivating 
Ceylon. 

Perhaps the most cherished recollection of all 
will be of a fine hotel which, from its lawn-covered 
cliff, overlooks on the one hand the thronged sea wall 
promenade that stretches away toward down-town 
Colombo and on the other, the blue Indian Ocean whose 
surf breaks beneath its broad verandas. After strenuous 
months of travel, full of more or less harrowing hotel ex- 
periences, can you imagine what a delight it is to 
luxuriate in a hotel thus situated, whose rooms, food and 
service are almost on a par with the finest hostelries of 
Europe and America? In our present frame of mind, 
we don't much care whether the steamer from Hong 
Kong which is to take us on the long three- weeks' voyage 
to France gets here on time or not. Were we not so eager 
for a lung-full of crisp Minnesota air our trunks would 
remain unpacked indefinitely at the "Galle Face." 
This tribute to the best hotel in all the Orient we cannot 
withhold even at the risk of being charged with press- 
agenting. 



127 



"MAHATMA" GANDHI— DEMI-GOD 
OR DEMAGOGUE? 

March 1922 
At Sea 

WE were extremely fortunate to have had a glimpse 
of India at a moment likely to prove so 
epochal in its history. We had been warned 
that the whole country was seething with rebellion and 
that travel there would be difficult if not dangerous. 
While at times it did prove both difficult and dis- 
agreeable, no untoward incident that possibly could be 
charged to the present acute political situation marred 
our stay in the land of caste, idolatry and "Non- 
cooperation." 

The nearest approach to anything of the sort was 
a rather amusing experience we had one sunny January 
morning in Benares, while drifting slowly along the temple- 
lined north shore of the Ganges watching multitudes of the 
devotees of that sacred stream engaged in their filthy 
ritualistic abultions. Suddenly we became aware that 
a loud chorus of voices was shouting derisively at us from 
the bank the familiar battle cry of the Non-cooperators — 
''Mahatma Gandhi — Jci-jai'' ("Long life and victory to 
the great soul, Gandhi."). It transpired that we had 
been mistaken for Britishers, and when our native guide 
shouted back that it was Americans instead whom they 
were jeering, the vociferous bathers hastened to send 
one of their number out to our barge to bedeck us apo- 
logetically with garlands of flowers — faded, bad smelling 
altar flowers. 

Although the alarming reports that had reached us 
proved exaggerated, there is nevertheless serious 

128 



^'Mahatma" Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

trouble brewing in India today. For the first 
time since the tragic mutiny of 1857, British rule 
there is being openly challenged and in consequence an 
air of tense anxiety pervades the European quarter of 
every city in the land. And what makes the challenge so 
dumbfounding to the English, is its wholly unprecedented 
character — that and the remarkable personality of the 
man who has shaped it. Every nation has had to 
contend with radical agitators and real or would-be 
revolutionists but surely none was ever afflicted 
with a trouble maker so baffling in his methods and so 
capable of large-scale mischief as ''Mahatma" Gandhi, 
the head and front of India's extraordinary Non- 
cooperative movement. 

Equipped with a broad university education and 
sharpened by years of successful practice at the bar, this 
amazing man has renounced the work-a-day world, given 
away his earthly possessions and turned his back on modern 
civilization in an attempt to free hundreds of millions of 
his dark-skinned countrymen from what he regards, or 
seems to regard, as the white man's misrule. He has 
discarded his modish European clothes for the simple loin 
cloth of the Indian coolie and in this almost naked con- 
dition travels about the country delivering speeches and 
attending political conventions. When at home his time 
is employed in editing his magazine, "Young India;" in 
conferring with his lieutenants; in issuing manifestos to 
the public; in hurling defis at the government — and in 
operating, hours at a time, a primitive spinning wheel. 

He preaches brotherly love, practises the virtues 
decries intemperance, strikes hard blows at India's 

129 



'^Mah atma'^ Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

blighting caste system and condemns in severest terms 
the use of force as a means to revolutionary ends, — "non- 
violence" and "passive resistance," terms which he has 
borrowed from Tolstoy, being the chief foundation stones 
of his political strategy. When some of his fanatical 
followers get out of hand and murder the police, he 
punishes them by going on a ten-day fast, and when, as 
recently happened, his young daughter offends with a 
harmless fib, he grieves her to distraction by going with- 
out food fort wo weeks. Millions of devout Hindus, among 
them some of the brainiest and most successful natives of 
the country, regard him as saint and prophet, while 
other millions actually believe him to be a reincarnation 
of the great Brahman god, Vishnu. 

It is this manner of man who, by methods unparal- 
leled in their uniqueness, is trying to force England out 
of India. Blending spiritual leadership with political 
he has fired the imagination and captured the hearts of no 
small part of a people whose religion and politics 
have always been hopelessl}^ interwoven. His power 
appears to lie partly in his ability to sway the mass mind 
with voice and pen and partly, perhaps chiefly, in the 
effect produced by his spectacular humility, self-renunc- 
iation and courage, and his seemingly transparent 
honesty and sincerity. 

But is he sincere, and if so, is he sane? Remember- 
ing his educational advantages and the fact that he has 
so often argued intricate law points with logic and success 
it is difficult for transient and impartial observers to credit 
him with both sincerity and sanity when he says, as in 
substance he does say in his book on "Indian Home Rule," 

130 



''Mahatma" Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

that modern civilization only breeds godlessness and im- 
morality; that modern education only enslaves the masses; 
that the law courts should be abolished because they 
make men unmanly; that hospitals should go because 
they propagate sin; that doctors should stop practicing 
medicine because they prescribe useless drugs; that rail- 
ways should be scrapped because they spread 
bubonic plague and increase the frequency of 
famine, also because they accentuate the evil nature of 
man by enabling bad men to accomplish their designs 
more speedily by train than they could afoot or by 
donkey or camel; finally, that power machinery of 
all kinds should be discarded because it is "like a great 
snake-hole which may contain one or a hundred snakes"! 

To Westerners such stuff sounds like the ravings 
of a disordered mind, or else the calculated utterances of 
a super-demagogue, seeking to befuddle an extremely 
credulous, ignorant and superstitious following. 

We are the more inclined to wonder at the apparent 
general belief in Gandhi's sincerity when we learn of his 
systematic and untiring efforts to keep open the Khilaf at 
and Punjab sores — sores which have become immensely 
irritating of late to multitudes of John Bull's Indian 
subjects. 

To understand the merest rudiments of the complex 
situation underlying the controversy over the "Khilaf at," 
a term of sundry spellings indicating the spiritual 
sovereignity of the Sultan of Turkey over Mohammedans 
of all races and nations, one must bear in mind these facts : 

There are about 66,000,000 Moslems in India. 
131 



''Mahatma' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

Most of the remaining 253,000,000 of the population 
are of the Hindu faith. Between these two sects there 
has existed a bitter, age-old quarrel. While the British 
have been careful to see that this did not break out 
into any open, widespread conflict, they apparently 
have not sat up nights trying to heal the breach. 
Very likely they have figured that a divided opposition 
could be handled more effectively than a united one. 
It further appears that during the World war the Moham- 
medans of India were almost solidly loyal to Great 
Britain and her allies, notwithstanding Germany's 
frantic efforts to win them away, but that after the war 
was over and it was found that the Peace Conference, 
presumably dominated by English statesmen, had dis- 
membered Turkey, certain Moslem agitators in 
India raised a great hue and cry about the Khilafat's 
loss of power; also about the continued occupation 
of Constantinople and other "holy cities" of the 
Near East by "infidel" English troops. Notwith- 
standing that the Mohammedans of India had at no 
time in the past evinced the least concern for the welfare 
of the Turkish Sultan nor the slightest interest in the 
fate of his holy capital, and despite the fact that many 
of them had so recently borne arms against him, consider- 
able sentiment was manufactured against the English 
on these grounds. 

All of which was grist for Mr. Gandhi's mill. In 
such a situation apparently he saw an opportunity to 
bring the Moslems of India into his camp and by 
consolidating them with their ancient enenies, the Hindus, 
present a solid front of native opposition to the British 

132 



"Mahatma'' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

rulers. At any rate, it is a matter of record that he, a 
Hindu of the Hindus, has lost no chance from that time 
to bewail publicly the great Khilafat "wrong." Every 
one of his manifestos contains some reference to the 
dreadful way in which England has treated the Turks, 
— the co-religionists of his dear friends, the Indian 
Moslems. 

Then the "Punjab affair." In the summer of 1919, 
sedition was rife in that great province of northern 
India and riots were of frequent occurrence. In quelling 
a particularly serious disturbance of the sort, a British 
brigadier general was finally compelled to fire on the mob, 
and very reluctantly so according to all accounts. A good 
many of the rioters were killed, and instantly all India 
was in uproar. The noise reverberated in England and 
so greatly alarmed the government that the unfortunate 
general in question was ordered out of India, and, in a 
manner, publicly reprimanded for his zealous "indiscre- 
tion." After this amende to their injured feelings the 
ordinarily docile and forgiving Indians would doubt- 
less have forgotten the incident forthwith had not 
Mr. Gandhi promptly proceeded to capitalize it to his 
own political advantage. Since then he has never per- 
mitted the people to forget for a moment the "horrors 
of the Punjab massacre." 

All of which smatters so much of the methods of a 
shrewd, calculating, not to say unscrupulous, manipu- 
lator of political cards that we find it quite impossible 
to sympathize with all the talk we have recently heard, 
some of it even from English sources, about Mr. Gandhi's 
near-godliness. 

133 



''Mahatma' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

The' man's political program is deadly, the more 
deadly because it is so wholly without precedent in the 
annals of British colonial history, or in those of any 
other country for that matter. Briefly, it consists in a 
demand for India's complete, or practically complete, 
independence, under penalty of a stupendous mass 
boycott of all government institutions. This unheard- 
of scheme Gandhi has unfolded bit by bit until it now 
means in effect, and if successful, the eventual paralysis 
of every vital government function, army, police, state- 
controlled railways and the postal and telegraph service. 
Government subsidized schools would close from lack 
of both students and teachers, and even courts of justice 
would stand idle for lack of judges, lawyers and litigants, 
the latter submitting their disputes to private courts of 
arbitration instead. 

The crowning feature of the Non-cooperator's 
political program, that which Gandhi naively terms 
*'mass civil disobedience" — the feature on which he has 
repeatedly marched and countermarched during the 
past year and which has now brought him into head-on 
collision with the authorities — is the proposal that his 
followers shall refuse to pay their taxes, even though 
the alternative be confiscation of their property, im- 
prisonment, or possibly death. 

The Gandhi economic program is simplicity itself. 
All foreign-made goods are to be boycotted and every 
thing necessary to India's needs is to be made at home. 
So far as cotton goods are concerned every family is to 
operate its own spinning wheel and hand loom. To 
keep this idea constantly before the people the spinning 

134 



,,Mahatma'' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

wheel has been made the national emblem of the Non- 
cooperators and Mr. Gandhi himself, as before stated, 
sets a daily example in its use. It is in evidence wher- 
ever one goes, full-sized wheels being frequently borne 
aloft through the streets by enthusiastic marching clubs, 
while models in miniature are to be seen in the shops of 
every bazaar. 

All in all, could such a program of political and 
economic absurdities, promoted by a man of such amaz- 
ing characteristics, "get to first base" in any country on 
earth, save imaginative, impressionable, impractical, 
incomprehensible India .^^ 

Precisely what numerical strength the Non-co- 
operators have no one knows, aside from those within 
the inner circle of control. Like Townley's Nonpartisan 
League, the organization has a paid membership, though 
the annual fee is only four annas, or about eight cents 
in our money. It is believed that several million 
members are enrolled on this basis, but whatever the 
actual number may be it probably represents but a 
fraction of those who sympathize with the cause and who, 
in a pinch, might be willing to fight for it, provided they 
had weapons. 

On the other hand, there are millions of ignorant 
Indians who take no interest whatever in public affairs 
and who are no more concerned about Mr. Gandhi and 
his doctrines than the same class of people in China 
are in what the self-appointed leaders of that country 
are doing. Then too it would be a mistake to assume 
that all of the intellectuals by any means, endorse 
his ideas. Many of the latter recognize that India is a 

135 



''Mahatma* Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

long way from being ready for home rule, or Stvaraj, as 
it is called in the vernacular; that the worst thing that 
could happen to the country's vast, heterogeneous and 
almost wholly illiterate population would be to let it 
experiment with real self-government at this time. Men of 
this type are sensible enough to see that demoracy, such as 
we know it in America, or even as the English at home 
know it, would be ages ahead of the times in a land 
where the bulk of the inhabitants are still living in the 
tenth century, or earlier; where there are as many 
languages as provinces; where a terrible iron-clad system 
of caste has erected hundreds of barriers which render 
free intercourse and association between the people 
utterly impossible; and where the chief national occupa- 
tion — or shall we call it pastime? — is the worship of thou- 
sands of gods, the Hindus alone having some 30,000 of 
these in stock. 

The better balanced, more thoughtful representatives 
of the native intellectual class also realize that England 
has really done much for India. They are aware 
that while, centuries ago, she embarked on her great 
Indian adventure with purely selfish motives, and that 
while her quasi-governmental trading corporation, the 
British East India Company, did many unconsionable 
things in those early days, just as similar companies chart- 
ered by the Dutch and Portugese did, nevertheless she has 
brought a considerable measure of civilization to the 
country which otherwise it could scarcely have secured so 
quickly. Mothers are no longer permitted to cast their 
living babes into the Ganges. It is no longer fashionable for 
widows to be burned alive on the funeral pyres of their 

136 



''Mahatma'' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

lamented husbands. People are no longer ground to 
death under the wheels of ponderous juggernaut cars. 
Justice, good old English justice, has been ordained 
between man and man. Property rights and legitimate 
personal liberty have been secured. Bloody foreign 
invasions have been stopped. Famine and pestilence, 
which formerly took tremendous toll of human life nearly 
every year, have been controlled to a large extent. 
More than a mere beginning of an excellent railway 
system has been built. Vast irrigation projects have 
been carried to completion and modern postal and 
telegraph systems have been extended in every direction. 
Above all else, perhaps, educational facilities never before 
dreamed of have been afforded the youth of the land, 
even Oxford and Cambridge having been thrown open to 
aspiring students not content with what the local schools 
of India have to offer. It is the irony of fate, by 
the way, that from this latter class Mr. Gandhi has 
recruited some of his ablest lieutenants. 

To all of which the radicals reply that England has 
exploited India long enough; that she should be content 
with her winnings and get out; that Indians are perfectly 
capable of managing their own affairs; that a race which 
has so recently engaged in a struggle with a sister 
white race, a struggle more terrific, more barbarous than 
any other known to history, should quit prating about 
western civilization and stop assuming a superior air 
toward an Asiatic people who, though admittedly of 
darker skin, had a civilization long before England was 
heard of. 

Which last "sockdologer" recalls a neat retort made 
137 



''Mahatma'' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

the other day by an eminent American educator now 
traveling in India to a Gandhi sympathizer who had 
twitted him of the fact that Indian civilization was old 
"when you Anglo-Saxons were still running about in 
your forests." "Yes," the professor dryly admitted, 
"but the difference is that we kept on running and you 
didn't". 

Although this constant fanning of the embers of 
race hatred has played an exceedingly important part 
in the efforts of the Gandhites to create revolutionary 
sentiment, it is doubtful if things could have been brought 
to their present unhappy pass by that process alone. 

India is suffering her full share of the present world- 
wide business depression and when a people like hers, 
who never, under any circumstances, know the meaning 
of real prosperity — who, at best, are never more than a 
jump ahead of those two universal functionaries, the tax 
collector and the undertaker — experience what they regard 
as unprecedently hard times, it can be seen easily what 
fertile soil the professional agitator has to work in. 

The net revenue derived from the average Indian 
farm, if an acre or so of parched ground can be called 
a farm, is less than 10 cents a day, while coolie laborers 
in the cities and towns are in luck when they earn 20 cents 
a day. 

These conditions, which can only mean malnutrition 
for the bulk of the population, are being capitalized to 
the fullest extent in the campaign against England. 

Another thing which has doubtless been of great 
aid to the agitators is Mr. Wilson's pronouncement 

138 



''Mahatma" Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

about self determination. That tragically unfortunate 
phrase, which has done so much to keep the world in 
turmoil ever since the Armistice, has been deeply pondered 
by many of the people of India. They fail to see why the 
principle it suggests should not apply to them as well as 
to others. 

The news of Gandhi's arrest came in a two-line flash 
to the Colombo papers just as we were sailing from 
Ceylon and we would give a handful of rupees, 
at the present rate of exchange, if only this ancient 
ark on which we are drifting across the hot Arabian Sea 
published a wireless paper, so we might learn how India 
has reacted to this long- threatened move. The jails 
of the country have for months been full to over- 
flowing with Gandhi's disciples, but the "Mahatma" 
himself has hitherto gone scot free. Though he is said 
to have repeatedly begged for arrest, the authorities 
have probably taken his own view of the matter and 
concluded that he would be more dangerous in prison 
than out. 

But now there seems to have been a sudden change 
of policy. The day before we left Colombo the resignation 
was announced of Mr. Montagu, Secretary of State for 
India in the British cabinet, the statesman supposed to be 
chiefly responsible for the passage by Parliament of the 
liberalizing "Government of India Act" of 1919. Almost 
everyone we met in India and almost every paper we 
read while there agreed that this measure, instead of 
placating the radicals as was hoped, has only 
stimulated them to greater activity. Also, that the 
lenient attitude of the Montagu administration towards 

139 



''Mahatma' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

Mr. Gandhi himself has merely had the effect of strength- 
ening his hands, having been interpreted by his followers 
as a sign of governmental weakness rather than tolerance. 
At the moment, therefore, Mr. Montagu seems to be 
the goat, although until this snail-like craft completes 
the Red Sea leg of its voyage and puts us once more in 
touch with world news we can only speculate as to whether 
he, or his manifold critics, have had the longer heads. 

The alarmists, who invariably refer to India as 
"seething", have been making the most doleful predictions 
about what would happen if the "people's idol" were 
locked up. The less nervous ones, and they seem to 
include those who have had longest experience in Indian 
affairs and are presumably best qualified to judge 
of the temperament of the natives, claim to have 
felt all along that the sooner the arch trouble-maker 
w^as silenced the sooner normal conditions would be 
restored. We have it on good authority that the British 
governor of one of the Indian provinces recently went so 
far as to declare that if only communication with London 
were cut, so that he and the other local authorities could 
act on their own initiative without interference from 
Whitehall, all India would be as quiet as a summer morn 
within sixty days. He doubtless figured that several 
hundred million people, unarmed, unorganized and 
undisciplined, would be no match for a few hundred 
thousand seasoned troops, equipped with machine guns 
and other implements of modern warfare. He, of course, 
also counted on the whole-hearted loyalty of those troops, 
but since the native element in the army greatly out- 
numbers the British, and since no one knows to what 

140 



"Mahatma" Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

extent Gandhism has infected the former, boasts of this 
kind may possibly be a trifle brash, especially when we 
recall what happened in 1857. 

The whole situation is of surpassing interest to the 
onlooker. Our own curbstone opinion of it, based on 
a hurried and naturally superficial survey, is that even 
were Mr. Gandhi now permanently retired from the 
stage, the seeds of discord he has already sown may 
yield a crop of trouble which will plague the English for 
many a day to come. Whether saint or scoundrel, 
demi-god or demagogue, he has succeeded in arousing 
animosities which will not quickly subside. 

If, in true revolutionary style, he had assembled 
an army and marched on Delhi, the government 
would have known exactly what to do, but when, in an 
ostentatiously peaceful, "non- violent" way, he attempts 
to put water in the petrol which makes the wheels of their 
machinery go round, what wonder is it that the 
authorities have been nonplussed to know how to deal 
with him, particularly in view of the halo of sancity with 
which he has been crowned? 

In any case he has started a train of thought and 
released a current of political energy among a great, un- 
wieldy and uneducated mass of humanity which no 
mere locking of jail doors is likely to stop. He has 
whetted the latent appetite of an ancient race for 
things which neither his party, the British, nor any 
other political influence can easily provide. 

Out of the whole confused mess one of three things 
seems certain to happen: 

141 



"Mahatma^' Gandhi — Demi-God or Demagogue? 

(1) India will become a more sternly-ruled British 
dependency than ever before. 

(2) She will be put in training speedily to qualify 
for membership in the great association of self-governed 
British commonwealths, alongside of Canada and 
Australia. Or 

(3) She will be permitted to go it alone. 

While the last contingency seems extremely im- 
probable, we have nevertheless heard the suggestion 
seriously advanced several times of late by people 
whose opinions are worth considering. They argue 
that on the heels of the most costly war of her career, 
and with a multitude of pressing problems nearer home 
to solve, Great Britain might well hesitate at the 
expenditure of blood and treasure needful to hold 
in line, on the other side of the globe, nearly a fifth of the 
world's population, assuming that that great mass of 
people were to show any widespread determination to 
break away. But it should be remarked that 

those who hold this pessimistic view are quick to add 
that if England and India ever do part company, 
the world will thereupon be treated to an unparalleled 
spectacle of anarchy and chaos — unless a miracle happens, 
and Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jains and all the 
conflicting races, sects, castes and political factions with 
which India is weighed down suddenly become enamored 
of each other and thus capable of real teamwork. 

Our own guess is that England will somehow manage 
to crack its gigantic Indian nut. Nut-cracking has been 
England's specialty for centuries. 

142 



LATER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE NON- 
COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT 

(Since the following letter throws important light on the 
more recent political developments in India, it seems 
permissible to include it here. Its writer. Sir Frederick 
Whyte, President of the National Assembly, is the ''suave 
speaker in his wig and gown'' alluded to in my Delhi 
letter. As the presiding officer of India's supreme law 
making body, and as a sincere friend of its people no less than 
a staunch supporter of the British government, his size-up 
of the situation following Mr. Gandhi's arrest cannot but 
be of interest. — F. L. G.) 

Simla, 26th June, 1922. 
Dear Mr. Gray, 

Many thanks for your letter of May 23rd which 
recalled to me your recent visit to Delhi. I have read with 
the greatest possible interest your account of the Indian 
situation in The Minneapolis Journal; and I hope you 
will allow me to say that I have never seen the situation 
so truly and vividly presented. You certainly got hold of 
the right end of the stick, and if only all your fellow- 
countrymen who visit the Orient had as keen an eye as 
you for the facts of the case, there would, perhaps, be 
more truth and less propaganda in the newspapers of the 
world. If there is any chance of your paying India a 
return visit, or of sending any of your friends out this 
way, I hope you will let me know. It will give me the 
greatest pleasure to do anything I can to make their 
visit easy and successful. 

143 



Later Developments in the N on-Cooperative Movement 

To continue the story which you have told so well 
in the columns of The Journal, I may add that we are 
now enjoying a period of comparative quiet, due no 
doubt to various causes. The official and the extremist 
alike agree that it is mainly due to the arrest of Gandhi 
and the detention in jail of a number of the leading 
Non-cooperators. That is, of course, partly true, but 
it is by no means the whole truth. Other causes which 
operate to place agitation at a very serious discount are : — 

(a) The unexpected success of the new Legislatures 
during the first two years of the operation of the Reform 
Scheme, known as the Montagu-Chelmsford plan: 

(b) The consequent irresolution of the whole Non- 
cooperation movement in face of the defeat of their 
principal prediction, namely, that the Reforms were a 
sham and would not work : and 

(c) The substantial improvement in the economic 
condition of the country due to the excellent rains of 
last year; and the increase in general public confidence 
due partly to the rains of last year and partly to the 
expectations of good rain this year. 

These causes have all operated to make the Non- 
cooperators call a halt in their agitation. In the 
''Maharastra," which is the most politically active part 
of the Bombay Presidency, in Bengal, and in certain 
other parts of the country, the local committees of 
Gandhi's Congress are now scratching their heads in 
the endeavour to find a face-saving formula which will 
cover their retreat from the extremes of non-cooperation 
and somehow pave a way for their entry into the new 
Legislatures. 

144 



Later Developments in the Non-Cooperative Movement 

A new election takes place in the late autumn of 
1923; and, probably, we shall then see large numbers of 
Non-cooper ators becoming cooperative legislators. 
The situation will then undergo a substantial change, 
and the principal difficulty will be to prevent a dead- 
lock between a Legislature holding extreme opinions 
and an Executive endeavouring to work what is undoubt- 
edly a comparatively liberal constitution. 

With kind regards, and many thanks once more for 
your letter, I am, 

Yours sincerely, 
A. F. Whyte. 



145 



HOME-COMING RUMINATIONS 

THEN, the great seas crossed, there came a happy 
day when we reached our own glorious land once 
more. We had left it nearly seven months 
before, when the leaves were falling. Now it was 
springtime, and Mother Earth had just donned her new 
gown. Everything was bursting into bloom. 

How one's eyes become misty and one's throat 
chokes as he reahzes that he is on his own country's soil 
again! Never before had we appreciated how much it 
means to be able to say: "I am a citizen of the United 
States of America." On several previous occasions we 
had greeted the Statue of Liberty with joyful hearts, 
but never before had "The Goddess" looked so winsome as 
when we saluted her on returning from this, our first 
trip 'round the world. 

Yet some strange reflections obtruded themselves as 
we sailed up the Bay that lovely evening in May. 
Could this boasted civilization of ours ever go to pieces? 
Would tourists from the Orient some day enter the 
harbor of New York to view the ruins of "Miss Liberty" 
and of those towering skyscrapers which now look down 
on her so haughtily from the opposite shore? Would 
lecturing guides explain that back in the 23rd century 
here stood a great metropolis, the metropolis of a people 
who had broken all speed records in history — in the 
building, and wrecking, of a nation? 

And could it be possible that these 35th century 
globe-trotters would be told that the ancient Americans 

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had developed a civilization so materialistic, so complex 
and intricate, so full of interdependent parts, that when 
its complicated economic mechanism got out of adjust- 
ment, when some vital part failed to function, the whole 
thing stopped— just as the most perfectly constructed 
automobile of today would, were its carburetor to go off 
duty, its battery to quit, its spark plugs to become dirty, 
its wiring to be "shorted," its radiator to run dry or its 
gas or oil to give out? 

Or, were such an unthinkable catastrophe to happen, 
would the sightseers of some future age be told that our 
then almost forgotten race had made the mistake of 
assuming that an enduring nation could be forged out of 
inharmonious, even antagonistic, elements, and that it 
could easily assimilate mHlions upon millions of aliens 
who knew little and cared less about the principles on 
which its government was founded? 

Or would the explanation perhaps be that a nation 
established by hard-working, God-fearing pioneers had 
become indolent and soft, eventually falling into decay, 
as a result of the worship of Mammon by its pleasure- 
loving people? 

No observing American can circumnavigate the globe 
without realizing, as never before, that his is the grandest 
country on earth. If, perchance, he has doubted the 
worthof its institutions, the pitiful scenes of benighted 
Asia and bewildered Europe should effectually allay 
his "unrest." But those very sights will also open 

his eyes to the fact that civilizations have a 
habit of landing on the scrap pile of Time; that 

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Home-Coming Ruminations 



empires, even republics, are prone to fall as well as rise. 
The smug assurance he has always felt that nothing of the 
sort could possibly overtake his own dear land is apt to 
be shaken a bit by study of the fundamental causes 
which underlie the ruins he sees everywhere in foreign 
lands, more especially so if he recognizes the same or 
equally dangerous influences at work in America. 

The man who says "You can always afford to bet on 
the United States" dwells with pride on its wonderful 
resources, its unparalleled past career and the freedom of 
opportunity which is assured to the humblest of its 
citizens. Patriots of this type are needed. Unquestion- 
ably such spirit as theirs has made America what it is to- 
day. But has not the time arrived when we should pay 
heed to the voice that warns as well as to the voice of the 
booster? While we still have vastly more ground for 
optimism than any other people on whom the sun ever 
shone, it should not be forgotten that we have been 
squandering our natural resources like spendthrifts; that 
our 133 years of existence as a nation is but a fleeting 
moment in world history; that democracy is still on trial; 
and that Freedom, on which we set such store, 
carries with it its own abuses and perils. 

America will come out all right, but only if we all 
understand and appreciate the blessed heritage of its 
citizenship and lend the nation a genuinely helping hand 
— the nation as a whole, not a mere section of it, not 
merely some one of its already too numerous classes, 
groups, blocs and self-seeking organizations. 

But enough of these Statue of Liberty musings. 
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And when the old home state and the old home town 
have been reached, what a joy to see kindly hands out- 
stretched to grasp yours, and the welcoming light in 
many a pair of friendly eyes to greet yours ! It is worth 
while to journey round the world, a dozen times, just 
to be greeted so kindly and to be told that you've been 
missed and that folks are glad to see you back! 

Friendship — friendship — what a word it is, after all! 
How much it means, what a barren life is his who does 
not know its meaning ! 

So may we be worthy of YOURS. 



^^^r-r— / 



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